The erotic motive in literature

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT
FUND GIVEN IN 189I BY

HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE

The original of tliis book is in
tlie Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027129919

THE EROTIC MOTIVE
IN LITERATURE

THE EROTIC MOTIVE
IN LITERATURE

BY

ALBERT MORDELL

AUTHOR or "the SHIFTING OF LITERARY VALUES,"
"DANTE AND OTHER WANING CLASSICS,"

ETO,

BONI AND LIVERIGHT

N Ew York 19^9

Copyright, 1919,

By BONI & LiVERIGHT, INC.

Printed in the V. S. A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Introduction i

II Eroticism in Life 20

III Dreams AND Literature 31

IV The (Edipus Complex and the Brother and

Sister Complex 51

V The Author Always UNCONsaousLV in His
Work 63

VI Unconscious Consolatory Mechanisms in Au-
thorship 83

Vn Projection, Villain Portrayals and Cynicism

AS Work of the Unconscious 97

Vin Genius as a Product of the Unconscious . . 107
IX Literary Emotions AND THE Neuroses . . .118

X The Infantile Love Life of the Author and

ITS Sublimations 132

XI Sexual Symbolism IN Literature . . . .150

XII Cannibalism: The Atreus Legend . . . .172

XIII Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism . .179

XIV Keats' Personal Love Poems 199

XV Shelley's Personal Love Poems 209

XVI Psychoanalytic Study OF Edgar Allan PoE . 220

XVII The Ideas of Lafcadio Hearn 237

XVIII Conclusion 244

V

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This work is an endeavour to apply some of the meth-
ods of psychoanalysis to literature. It attempts to read
closely between the lines of an author's works. It ap-
plies some principles in interpreting literature with a
scrutiny hiUierto scarcely deemed permissible. Only
such suggestions have been set down whose application
has been rendered fairly unimpeachable by science and
experience.

In studying literature thus, I aim to trace a writer's
books back to the outward and inner events of his life
and to reveal his unconscious, or that part of his psychic
life of which he is unaware. I try to show that un-
suspected emotions of the writer have entered into his
literary productions, that events he had apparently for-
gotten have guided his pen. In every book there is
much of the author's unconscious which can be dis-
covered by the critic and psychologist who apply a few
and well tested and infallible principles.

This unconscious is largely identical with the mental
love fantasies in our present and past life. Since the
terms "unconscious" and "erotic" are almost synony-
mous, any serious study of literature which is concerned

I

2 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

with the unconscious must deal impartially with erot-
icism.

Every author reveals more than he intended. Works
of the imagination open up to the reader hidden vistas
in man's inner life just as dreams do. As the psycho-
analyst recognises that dreams are the realised repressed
wishes of the unconscious, so the critic discovers in
literary performances ideal pictures inspired by past
repressions in the authors' lives. And just as anxiety-
dreams spring largely from the anxieties of waking life,
so literature describing human sorrows in general takes
its cue from the personal griefs of the author.

A literary work is no longer regarded as a sort of
objective product unrelated to its creator, written only
by compUance with certain rules. It is a personal ex-
pression and represents the whole man behind it. His
present and past have gone into the making of it and
it records his secret aspirations and most intimate feel-
ings; it is the outcropping of his struggles and disap-
pointments. It is the outlet of his emotions, freely flow-
ing forth even though he has sought to stem their flux.
It dates from his apparently forgotten infantile life.

We know that a man's reading, his early education,
his contact with the world, the fortunes and vicissitudes
of his life, have all combined to influence his artistic
work. We have learned that hereditary influences, the
nature of his relations to his parents, his infantile re-
pressions, his youthful love affairs, his daily occupa-
tions, his physical powers or failings, enter into the
colouring and directing of his ideas and emotions, and will
stamp any artistic product that he may undertake.
Thus with a man's literary work before us and with a
few clues, we are able to reconstruct his emotional and
intellectual life, and guess with reasonable certainty at

INTRODUCTION 3

many of the events in his career. George Brandes has
been able to build up a life of Shakespeare almost from
the plays alone. As he said, if we have about forty-
five works by a writer, and we still cannot find out much
about his life, it must be our own fault.

Again we may deduce what kind of literary work
would have been the result if there are given to us not
only the hereditary antecedents and biographical data
of an author, but a full account of his day dreams, ambi-
tions, frailties, disillusionments, of his favourite reading,
intellectual influences, love affairs and relations to his
parents, relatives and friends. I do not think it would
be difiicult for us to deduce from the facts we have of
Dante's life that he naturally would have given us a
work of the nature of the Divine Comedy.

Literature is a personal voice the source of which can
be traced to the unconscious.

But an author draws not only on the past in his own
life, but on the past psychic history of the human family. \
Unconscious race memories are revived by him in his ^
writing; his productions are influenced by most primi-
tive ideas and emotions, though he may not be aware
what they are. Yet they emerge from his pen; for /
the methods of thought and ways of feeling of our early
ancestors still rule us. Nor is the idea of unconscious
race memories idle speculation or fanciful theorising.
Just as surely as we carry in ourselves the physical marks
of our forefathers of which each individual has millions,
so undoubtedly we must have inherited their mental
and emotional characteristics. The manner and nature
of the lives of those who preceded us have never been
entirely eliminated from our unconscious. We have even
the most bestial instincts in a rudimentary stage, and
these are revived, to our surprise, not only in our dreams

4 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

but in our waking thoughts and also occasionally in
our conduct. We carry the whole world's past under
our skins. And there is a sediment of that primitive
life in many of our books, without the author being
aware of the fact.

Thus_ja deterministiejnfluence prevails in literature.
A boo^is not_an accicknt. The_^nature_of,its con-
tents depends npt only on hereditary influences, nor,
as Taine thought, on chmate, country and. environment,
alone, but on the nature of the repressions the author's
emotions have experienced. The impulses that cr gated
it are largely unconscious, and the only conscious traces
in it are those in jQi¥'art "iof^ composition. Hence the
ancient idea of poetic inspiration..cannot be relegated
to limbo, for if plays a decided part in determining the
psychical features of _the.T?ork. inspiration finds its ma-
terial in the unconscious. When the writer is inspired,
he is eager to express ideas and feelings that have been
formed by some event, though he cannot trace their ori-
gin, for he speaks out of the soul of a buried humanity.

There is no form or species of literature that may
not be interpreted by psychoanalytic methods. Be the
author ever so objective, no matter how much he has
sought to make his personality intangible and elusive,
there are means, with the aid of clues, of opening up
the barred gates of his soul. Men like Flaubert and
Merimee, who believed in the impersonal and objective
theory of art and who strove deliberately to conceal their
personalities, failed in doing so. Their presence is re-
vealed in their stories; they could not hold themselves
aloof. It is true we have been aided by external evi-
dence in learning what methods they employed to ren-
der themselves impersonal; the real Merimee and Flau-
bert, however, were made to emerge by the help of their

INTRODUCTION S

published personal letters. It matters not whether the
author writes realistic or romantic fiction, autobiograph-
ical or historical tales, lyric or epic poems, dramas or
essays, his unconscious is there, in some degree.

But in a field which is largely new, it is best to take
those works or species of writing where the existence of
the unconscious does not elude our efforts to detect it.
Therefore, much will be said in this volume of works
where there is no question that the author is talking from
his own experiences, in his own person, or where he is
using some character as a vehicle for his own point ot
view. Such works include lyric poetry which is usually \
the personal expression of the love emotions of the j
singer. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Swinburne i
have left us records of their love affairs in their great \
lyric poems. Most of these were inspired by frustration \
of love, and were the results of actual experiences. And j
though much is said in them, other facts may be deduced. ;

It is also a fact that nearly every great novelist hasr
given us an intimate though disguised account of him-^
self in at least one novel (note David Copperfield and
Pendennis as examples), while other writers have drawn
themselves in almost every character they portrayed,
Goethe and Byron being two instances. An author gives
us the best insight into himself when he speaks frankly
in his own person. His records are then intensely in-
teresting and informative about his unconscious. But
even if the author identifies himself with a fictitious
character he speaks hardly less firmly.

n

Very important is the consideration of some of the
literature where authentic dreams or dreams having the

6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

appearance of authenticity have been recorded. The
connection between poetry and dreams has often been
noted. The poet projects an ideal and imaginary world
just as the dreamer does. He builds Utopias and para-
dises and celestial cities. He sees visions and constructs
allegories. I have interpreted, according to the methods
of Freud, some dream literature like Kipling's Brush-
wood Boy and Gau tier's Arria Marcdla. These tales
prove most astoundingly the correctness of Freud's
theories about dreams being the fulfilment in our sleep
of unconscious wishes of our daily life.

A literary production, even if no dream is recorded
therein, is still a dream; that of the author. It rep-
resents the fulfilment of his unconscious wishes, or
registers a complaint because they are not fulfilled. Like
the dream, it is formed of remnants of the past psychic
life of the author, and is coloured by recent events and
images. Freud in interpreting the dreams of his neuro-
tic patients, learns the substance, the manifest content
of the dream, as he calls it, and inquires about the events
of the preceding days and he evokes all the associations
which occur to the patients. He learns something of
their lives and finally after a course of psychoanal3^ic
treatment frequently cures them of their neuroses by
making them aware of the unconscious repressions or
fixations from which they suffer. These are removed
and the resistances are broken down. As critics, we'
may interpret a book in the same way. A literary work
stands in the same relation to the author as the
dream to the patient. The writer has, however, cured
himself of his emotional anxiety by giving vent to his feel-
ings in his book. He has been his own doctor. The
critic may see how this has been accomplished and point
out the unconscious elements that the writer has brought

INTRODUCTION 7

forth in his book out of his own soul. The critic, not
being able, like the physician and his patient, to ques-
tion the author in person, must avail himself, in addition
to the internal evidence of the literary product itself, of
all the data that have been collected from the author's
confessions and letters, from the accounts of friends,
etc. After having studied these in connection with the
writing in question, he learns the author's unconscious.
Shelley's EpipsycMdion, for instance, is an autobiograph-
ical poem, Shelley's dream of love, and can be fully fol-
lowed only when the reader has acquainted himself with
the history of Shelley's marriages and love affairs.

I have interpreted a dream of Stevenson recorded in
his A Chapter on breams, and have found in it a full
confirmation of the Freudian theory of dreams, Steven-
son, recounting at length a dream of his own, tells us
unwittingly more about the misunderstanding that ex-
isted between him and his father and the difficulties
he encountered before he married (since the object of
his affection was separated but not yet divorced from
her first husband) than his biography does. When the
essay and the biography are taken together, we see the
testimony before us as to why Stevenson dreamed this
dream.

William Cowper's poem on the receipt of his mother's
picture is a remarkable document in support of one of
the tenets that are among the pillars of Freud's system,
the theory of the GEdipus Complex. As is well known,
Freud traced the nucleus of the psychoneuroses to an
overattachment that the patient had for the parent of
the opposite sex, a fixation which was very strong in
infancy but from the influence of which there had never
been a healthy liberation. This fixation which is often

8 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

unconscious plants the seeds of future neuroses. The
victim's entire life, even his love affairs, are interfered
with by this attachment. Any one who knows his Freud
and has read Cowper's poem can see in it the cause of
most of the latter's unhappiness and most likely his
insanity. His mother died when he was a child, and
many years later he was writing to her, almost with
passion.

Both Stevenson's essay and Cowper's poem are self-
explanatory to the disciple of Freud. If we had known
nothing about the authors' lives, we would have seen
beyond doubt that in the one case there was in actual
life a hostility to the father, revealed by the dreamer's
murdering him; and in the other case we would have
known that a hysterical overattachment to the mother
existed and that the writer's life would have been neu-
rotic and that he might possibly experience an attach-
ment to some older woman who replaced the mother.

Further, just as there are typical dreams from which
alone the psychoanalyst can judge the wishes of his
subject without asking him any questions about him-
self, so there are literary compositions wherefrom we
can learn much of the author's unconscious, without
probing into the facts of his life. Typical dreams in
which certain objects like serpents or boxes appear, or
in which the dreamer is represented as flyingj swimming
or climbing, have a sexual significance. Freud has shown
this after having investigated thousands of such dreams
and noted the symbolic language and customs of our
ancestors. Literary works also speak per se for the au-
thor when they abound in similar symbolical images.

INTRODUCTION

ni

We now come to another species of literature that is
important for the psychoanalytic critic. This is a class
of writing which delineates primaeval and immoral emo-
tions. It often shows us the conflicts between savage
emotions still lurking in man, and the demands of civili-
sation. Either force may triumph, but the real interest
of these works is that they show the old cave dweller
is not yet dead within us, and that civilisation is achieved
gradually by suppressing these old emotions; sometimes
these needs are strong and must not be extirpated too
suddenly; in fact in some specific cases must be granted
satisfaction. Among some of the interesting books in
recent years have been tales where primitive emotions
have been depicted as conquering their victims. Note
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where it is shown how the
old barbarian instincts and the cry of the forest are part
of us and may be revived in us. Jack London's Call of
the Wild is an interesting allegory on the subject. It is
well known that we, are descended from forbears who
were wilder than the most savage tribes of to-day. Nat-
urally some of the emotions they felt are not altogether
extinct in us. Civilisation is after all but a veneer and
slight causes may stir up brutal sensations in many peo-
ple. They are still in our unconscious and form for the
literary man- very fascinating though often dangerous
material. Shakespeare understood this when he drew
Caliban.

Poe once said that no writer would dare to write
truly all his inner thoughts and feelings, for the very
paper would burn beneath them. What he meant was
that all writers, even the bravest, suppress those un-

10 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

conscious elements in their nature that are related to
immorality, indecency, degeneracy, morbidity and cruel-
ty. It may not be advisable for writers continually to
remind the reader of the remnant echoes and memories
of our primitive state, which have fortunately been
made quiescent but not been completely exterminated ty
culture. In the confessions of criminals, in the patho-
logical disclosures of sexually aberrated people given to
physicians, in the records of atrocities committed in
time of war, we have illustrations of the atavisms of our
day. Often a diseased literary man ventures far in
baring his soul and we get the morbid and immoral ma-
terial that provides food for the unhealthy.

As a rule the author's sense of propriety and prudence
act as a censor for him and hedge in his dormant sav-
age feelings, so as not to allow them to find a direct
voice in his art. Yet we can often pierce through the
veil and observe exactly where the censor has been
invoked and guess fairly accurately what has been
suppressed.

Some authors who relax the censorship voluntarily and
appear to be without a sense of shame, give us some
of the immoral literature which the world publicly ab-
hors, but which individuals often delight in reading in
private. I do not refer to the really great literature
which has been stamped "immoral" by prudish people,
because its ideas are too far advanced for them to ap-
preciate, and are different from the conventional morals
of society. I do not refer to the hundreds of great
works which give us true accounts of the natural man,
books whose irresistibility cannot be evaded except by
hypocrites. I do not include novels and plays wherein
the authors have realised that we are exerting too great
a sacrifice upon our emotions and that many souls are

INTRODUCTION ii

starved by lack of normal gratification on account of
the harsh exactions of conventional society. But there
is a real immoral (or rather indecent) literature where
the author allows his savage instincts to come to the
surface and trespass on those aspects of his personality
which civilisation should have tamed. He may suffer
from the vice of exhibitionism and think he is frank,
when he is merely showing he has no sense of shame;
and he may cater to a market merely for money, in
which case he acts like a mercenary harlot. He may try
to gratify himself by sexual abandon in art because he
has never had the craving for love satisfied in life. He
gives vent to instincts that are still ruling him because
of his own atavistic or neurotic state. Psychoanalytic
literature puts in a new light immoral literature, which
hitherto has been dealt with from a moral, and not a
psychological, point of view. This literature should be
explained and its sources traced; these will be found in
the infantile love life of the authors. Such writings
should not be condemned offhand just because they stir
our moral indignation. They must be inteipreted so that
we may learn the nature of their authors.

I have also made a study of so repulsive a feature in
the lives of our earliest ancestors as cannibalism. It
is one of the most primitive emotions. The discoveries
of archaeologists show that cannibalism prevailed in Eu-
rope before the dawn of history; Greek plays show its
early existence in Greece; and we know that it still pre-
vails among savage tribes to-day.

Many of the views here presented will be strange and
novel to those unacquainted with or hostile to Freud's
theories, or to those who wish to ignore the fact of the
existence of primitive emotions in man. The ideas ad-
vanced here will displease the puritanical opponents of

12 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

scientific research. But it should be borne in mind that
a study of the unconscious must necessarily deal with
much that is obnoxious in human nature.* A study of
this unpleasant element leads to the attainment of a
more natural and moral life. But we should also re-
member that the unconscious, besides containing the
seeds of crime and immorality, also is the soil of all
those finer emotions that the church and the state cher-
ish. Conscience, self-sacrifice, moral sense, love, are
unconscious sentiments.

I should have liked to treat of the literature of me-
tempsychosis. In this literature where people are de-
picted as remembering past existences, as in Kipling's
tale, The Finest Story in the World, George Sand's Corir
suelo, and Jack London's The Star Rover, there may be
possible avenues to race memories. Needless to say, I
do not believe in the transmigration of the individual
soul as some of the Greeks and early Christians did. But
the Buddhistic conception of metempsychosis with its
doctrine of the Karma, the scientific theory of heredity,
and the conception of psychoanalysis are all dominated
by a similar idea; this is, that the manners of feeling
and thinking of our progenitors are exercised by us.
We carry their souls, not the individual, but the col-
lective ones; we are the products of their sins and vir-
tues; we have all the idiosyncrasies, mental make up,
emotional tendencies, that they had; we have stamped
on us our race, our nation, our religion. We cannot
remember isolated events of past ages, but the effects

*The reader should also remember that such fearsome
words as (i) "sex," (2) "incest," (3) "homosexualism,"
(4) "sadism," etc., include in psychoanalysis (i) love, (2)
great affection between mother and son, father and daughter,
brother and sister, (3) intense friendship,. (4) cruelty, etc.,
respectively.

INTRODUCTION 13

of happenings then are registered in our nervous system.
No one has done more than Hearn to show this, and he
is, both because of his life and work, one of the fittest
subjects for psychoanalytic study. The only possible
rival he has is Edgar Allan Poe.

If any one wishes to see an adroit application of the
method of reading between the lines in a poem, let him
read Lafcadio Heam's interpretation of Browning's poem
A Light Woman in the Appreciations of Poetry. Hearn
had probably never heard of Freud, but in his lecture to
his class, he showed that the unconscious of the author
and the character could be discovered by probing care-
fully into the literary work. Hearn tells in prose Brown-
ing's story of the young man who claimed that he stole
his friend's mistress to save him, and on tiring of her
pretended he had never loved her. Hearn shrewdly
observes:

"Does any man in this world ever tell the exact truth
about himself? Probably not. No man understands
himself so well as to be able to tell the exact truth about
himself. It is possible that this man believes himself to
be speaking truthfully, but he certainly is telling a lie,
a half truth only. We have his exact words, but the
exact language of the speaker in any one of Browning's
monologues does not tell the truth, it only suggests the
truth. We must find out the real character of the
person, and the real facts of the case, from our own
experience of human nature."

Psychoanalysis was applied to literature long before
Freud. When biographers recounted all the influences
of an author's life upon his works, or probed deeply into
the real meaning of his views, they gave us psychoana-
lytic criticism. Great literary critics like Sainte-Beuve,
Taine and George Brandes traced the tendencies of au-

14 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

thors' works to emotional crises in their lives. Critics
who study the various ways in which authors have come
to draw themselves or people they knew in their books,
are psychoanalytic. When biographers and critics dilate
especially on the relations existing between the writer
and his mother, and trace the effects on the work of the
author, they employ the psychoanalytic method. Any
profound insight into human nature is psychoanalytic,
and I find such insight in Swift, Johnson, Hazlitt and
Lamb.

It is, however, Freud who first gave complete applica-
tion of that method to literature. He first touched on
it in his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams in
1900, when he saw the significance of the marriage of
CEdipus to his mother in Sophocles's play (Edipus. He
showed that it was a reminiscence of actual incestuous
love that was practised far back in the ages of barbarism,
and that the play shows horror as a reaction to such at-
tachment to the mother. The first treatment of an
aesthetic theme from the new point of psychoanalysis
was made by Freud in his book on Wit and the Uncoiv-
scious in 1905. The first sole application of psycho-
analysis to a work of literature was undertaken by him
in connection with Jensen's novel Gradiva in 1907,
where he shows the similarity between the emotions of
the hero and the psychoneuroses. (The novel and
Freud's essay have been both translated into English.)*
Freud also studied Leonardo da Vinci and showed the
influences of the artist's infantile love life upon his later
career and work. Psychoanalytic methods have been
applied to music, mythology, religion, philosophy, phil-
ology and morals, and indeed to almost every sphere of
mental activity. Many monographs have been published

* Delusion and Dream, Moffat, Yard & Co.

INTRODUCTION 15

by Freud's disciples, taking up the relations between an
author and his work. Sadger studied the poets Lenau,
Kleist, and F. K. Meyer and showed the power of in-
fantile influence. On this side of the ocean little work
has been done in this direction, but that little has been
excellent. Professor Ernest Jones's study of the (Edip-
us Complex in Hamlet {American Journal of Psychology,
January, 1910), Dr. Isidor Coriat's account of the hys-
teria of Lady Macbeth and Professor F. C. Prescott's
scholarly essay on the relation between poetry and
dreams {Journal of Abnormal Psychology, April, June,
1912), are excellent pioneer works in psychoanalytical
literary criticism.*

IV

Freud is a genius whose performances astonish one
as do those of a wizard. His revolutions in psychology
are no less important than those of Darwin in biology.
After his discoveries, literary interpretation cannot re-
main the same. Tbe points of difference between Him

* There are in English but few articles applying psycho-
analytic methods to writers and thinkers. Some of them are :
Alfred Kuttner's "The Artist" in Seven Arts, Feb., 1917;
Wilfrid Lay's " 'John Barleycorn' Under Psychoanalysis,"
"H. G. Wells and His Mental Hinterland" and "The Mar-
riage Ideas of H. G. Wells" in The Bookman (N.Y.), March,
July and August, 1917, respectively ; A. R. Chandler's "Tragic
Effects in Sophocles" in "The Monist" (1913) ; W. J. Karpas's
"Socrates in the Light of Modern Psychology" in The Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 10, p. 185; and Phyllis Blan-
chard's "Psychoanaljrtic Study of Comte" in the American
Journal of Psychology, April, 1918.

Two indispensable articles are the summaries by Rudolph
Acher and by Lucille Dooley of "Psychoanalytic Studies of
Geniuses," published in German. The reader should study
these articles in the American Journal of Psychology for July,
1911, and July, 1916, respectively.

1 6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

and his disciples Jung and Adler need not be touched
on here. My own sympathies are with Freud.

The new method will help to explain the nature and
origin of literary genius, though it is not pretended it
will create it. Psychoanalysis will show us the direc-
tion that literary genius takes and will explain why
it proceeds in a particular path. It will give the reasons
why one author writes books of a particular colour or
tendency, why he entertains certain ideas. It explains
why certain plots and characters are indulged in by
particular authors. It claims to tell why Schopenhauer
became a pessimist, why Wagner dealt with themes like
the woman between two men. In fact studies of these
artists, employing Freud's methods, have already been
published. Graf and Rank each wrote about Wagner,
and Hitschman has given us a monograph on Schopen-
hauer. Similarly the critic of the future will ex-
plain the fundamental tone of the works of writers who
differ vastly from each other. We will see more clearly
why Byron gave vent to his note of melancholy, Keats
to his passion for beauty. Browning to his spirit of
optimism, Strindberg to his misogyny, Swift to his
misanthropy, Ibsen to his moral revolt, Tolstoi to his
religious reaction, Thackeray to his cynicism, and Words-
worth to his love for nature.

The author is more in his work than he suspects. To
illustrate: There is a theory of projection, in psychoa-
nalysis, which explains to us that hysterical people lean
with great eagerness for moral support or consolation
on some actual person they love or admire. Often he
is the clerg}mian or physician, at other times he is a
friend or relative. The same thing occurs in literature.
The writer who has certain theories clings for support to
some characters in history or fiction. He projects his

INTRODUCTION 17

personality on theirs. If he writes a biography he
chooses a type most like himself and is really writing his
own life. Renan's Lije of Jesus is really a life of Renan
and he makes Jesus have many qualities he himself
had. I have compared Renan's autobiography to his
Life of Jesus and shown the resemblance between Renan
and the Jesus of his creation.

An author also identifies himself with his characters
and draws unconsciously on himself when he creates
them. I have discovered a personal note in an epic
like the Iliad, usually considered impersonal. I have
deduced that the master passion of the author of the
Achilles-Patroclus story was friendship, and that he sang
a private sorrow in Achilles' grief for Patroclus. I have
been aided in this by a dream of Achilles.

Authors also often draw their villains from their un-
conscious. They indulge in exaggeration, disguise and
various other devices. Balzac's worst villain, the in-
tellectual, unmoral Vautrin, is the Dr. Hyde of Balzac
himself let loose in a fictitious character. And we know
Byron was even accused of having committed the crimes
of his villains. This, however, does not mean that the
creator of vicious types himself may not be the purest
person in his personal life. We must not conclude that
actual events of a fictitious work have happened to the
author himself. And this brings me to the real danger t/
of a critical study of this kind.

I have maintained a double guard over myself so as
not to transcend the danger line. I have sought not
to interpret as a portrait of the author's own life, his
delineation of a character, when no reason warrants
such a conclusion. It is absurd to conclude that isolated
incidents in a novel happened in the writer's own life. It
is only when a writer harps on one plot — one motive —

i8 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

continually — and in several works, that one's suspicions
are aroused that he is really writing about himself.
It is only when there is a genuine ring to the cry of
distress, that the reader suspects that the work is more
than a mere literary exercise. The early readers of
Heine, De Musset and Leopardi, saw that the poets were
singing about real sorrows. No one ever doubted that
Goethe, Ibsen and Tolstoi used fictitious characters as
vehicles for their own ideas, and that Wilhelm Meister,
Brand and Levine were really the authors themselves.

No doubt, many literary men will be among the first to
object to a theory of literary criticism which tends to
reveal their personalities more closely to the public. They
may claim that they are painfully careful to keep their
own views and personalities from the public eyes. I
do not think that anything derogatory to authors as a
whole will result from psychoanalytic criticism. They
should be the first to welcome this method. In fact
the older writers gain by the process of psychoanalytic
study. We become more liberal and admire them all
the more. I can only speak from my own studies and
say that my admiration for the personal character of
men like Byron and Poe, the moral standing of whom
has never been very high with the public, has increased
since my studies of psychoanalysis, and my appreciation
of their work has deepened.

The reader's indulgent attention is invited to the
pages where the effect upon literature of the sexual in-
fantile life of the author is treated. This involves a
resume of one of Freud's most important and most
abused discoveries, that the child has a love life of its
own, the development of which has most significant bear-
ing upon his entire life. More particular indulgence is
pleaded for the pages dealing with sex symbolism in

INTRODUCTION 19

literature. The critic who will find the author of this
volume obsessed with sex will be more charitably in-
clined if he first masters Freud's works or a good study
and summary of them like Dr. Hitschman's Freud's
Theories of the Neuroses, Dr. Brill's Psychanaiysis,
Pfister's The Psychoanalytic Method or Jones' Papers
on Psychoanalysis.

In conclusion, I quote a passage from William James
to show the significance of the unconscious in modern
psychology.

"I cannot but think," says William James in his Vari-
eties of Religious Experience (1902), (P. 233), "that
the most important step forward that has occurred in
psychology since I have been a student of that science
is the discovery, first made in 1886, that in certain ob-
jects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the
ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an
addition thereto in the shape of a set of memories,
thoughts and feelings which are extra-marginal and out-
side of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet
must be classed as conscious facts of some sort, able
to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs. I call
this the most important step forward because, unlike
the advances which psychology has made, this discovery
has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected peculiarity ifv
the constitution of hxmian nature."

CHAPTER II

EROTICISM IN LIFE

Psychology has in recent years investigated the
unconscious day dreams which are now recognised as
part of our imaginative life. No matter how religious or
moral we may be, erotic fancies are always with us.
This mental life has often been described in mediaeval
literature in the accounts of sensuous visions which
tempted saints. The authors who aimed at inculcating
moral and religious lessons thus gave vent to their own
erotic fancies in the alluring and enticing verbal pictures
they drew. Many instances thus appear in puritanical
and ascetic literature, of immorality and exhibitionism.

We are learning to deal directly with a phase of our
lives, whose influence upon our happiness can scarcely
be overestimated. We must first admit the reality of
the fantasies that occupy so much of our existence. Out
of them bloom as a flower the emotions which are associ-
ated with the noblest sentiments in human nature — love.
How these fancies may be sublimated into higher pur-
poses, Uke beautiful deeds and works of art, how they
may be directed into the channels of love, how they
may be partly gratified without impairing the finer in-
stincts of man, are problems which are being made the
subject of serious study. It is also being realised that

EROTICISM IN LIFE 21

these fancies increase in vividness, number and variety
where, for economic and conventional reasons, means of
normal love life are cut off. It is also being admitted
that much of the mental misery and physical debility
of many people is due to the absurd asceticism forced
upon us in sex matters by our modern civilisation.

We must learn to discuss, in a sincere manner, the
nature and tendencies of the erotic in our lives. Scien-
tists have the privilege of speaking openly on the sub-
ject; many literary men who have claimed the same free-
dom have used it, however, to evolve pornographic works
for commercial purposes. Yet no literary man to-day
would.be permitted to discuss sexual questions with the
frankness of Montaigne in his essay "Upon Some Verses
of Virgil."

Let us examine the word "erotic" itself. Unfortu-
nately it has assumed an unsavoury meaning, although it
means "related to love" and is derived from the Greek
work "eros" — love. It has been used to designate the
perverse and the immoral in sex matters; it has been
made synonymous with lust, abnormality, excess and
every unpleasant feature in regard to sex matters. Pater
once complained that he did not like the use of the word
"hedonism" because of the misapprehension created in
the minds of people who did not understand Greek. The
same objection may be brought against the use of the
word "eroticism." Properly speaking all love poetry is
erotic poetry; in fact the greatness of poetry and litera-
ture is its eroticism, for they are most true then to
life, which is largely erotic. To call a great poet like
Paul Verlaine erotic is a compliment, not a disparage-
ment. Nor is he nearly as erotic as the author of The
Song of Songs. Since there is no word in English to
specify love interest in its widest sense, we must cling

22 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

to the use of the words "erotic" and "eroticism." We
should restore to the word "eroticism" its original and
nobler meaning.

Any literary work that lays an emphasis on the part
played by love in our lives is erotic. Literature could
not exist without dwelling on the love interest. The
stories of Jacob and Rachel, of Ruth, and of David and
Uriah's wife, are all beautiful examples of eroticism in
the Bible.

Man is averse to admitting certain facts about his
mental love life. People are often shocked by the im-
morality of the dreams which reveal their unconscious
lives. A man, however, will often confess in intimate
circles the existence of sensuous fancies within himself.
People show indications in many ways of the parts
played by the love and sex interests in their mental
lives. Some witness suggestive plays; others indulge in
telling and hearing lewd jests, indecent witticisms and
improper stories. Any one who has listened to the con-
versation of men in the club or smoker, in the factory or
office, in the bar-room or sitting room, cannot be blind
to the fact that the erotic interests rule us far more than
we wish to admit. He who thinks that the wealthy are
too much absorbed in accumulating more riches and the
poor too much worn out by the struggle for existence,
to be occupied with erotic fancies, is mistaken. A day
spent in a factory or an evening at a club will show one
that the millionaire and the pauper are brothers under
their skins.

Man's nature is erotic to its very foundations; he
was erotic, in infancy, in his own way; he carries with-
in him all the erotic instincts of millions of ancestors for
thousands of years back. His eroticism extends to many
sensitive areas of his body like his lips, the palms of

EROTICISM IN LIFE 23

his hands, his chest and back. Eroticism often is hid-
den in an interest in many subjects which are apparent-
ly unrelated to it, an interest which is a compensation
to one for his lack of love. Man's first real combined
physical and spiritual suffering commences at puberty
when he hears new and strange voices in his soul calling
for a reply to which there is no answer. He discovers
that society is so constituted that he must spend his
youth, when the passions are at their height, in un-
naturally curbing or misdirecting them. He often dis-
covers later that even marriage is not a full satisfaction
for his love instincts.

Though man has refused to concede the importance
that the erotic has played in his life, his fellow men
who were poets spoke for him. They did not conceal the
truth, for the words in which their emotions were couched
betrayed them. Often the people persecuted their spokes-
man for uttering the truth, though they delighted in se-
cretly reading his books.

The "purist" to-day is often the one who revels (in
private) most in obscene literature; while many people
find in such literature the only means they have of in-
(/dulging their ungratified love life. Many book-sellers
make a specialty of furnishing pornographic books and
pictures to many roues and celibates.

The mere interest, however, in a virile and unhypo-
critical literary work like a novel by Fielding or Smollett,
does not indicate abnormal eroticism in the reader. In
fact, it is often a sign of some unhealthy tendency or
starvation in human nature when a person shrinks from
honest and frank literature. The school-boy or college
student who reads in stealth De Foe's novel Roxana,
instead of Robinson Crusoe, who turns from his Greek
version of Aristophanes to the translation of Lysistrata,

24 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

or who wearies of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canter-
bury Tales and tries to read in spite of the old English
"The Miller's Tale" or "The Reeve's Tale," is not an
immoral youngster. The reader who not having read
these works may look them up (now that they have been
mentioned) is not therefore an indecent or abnormal
person. The school-boy's as well as the reader's inter-
est is each additional proof of the erotic in us.

The real lover of literature who has read most of the
Latin poets, English dramatists and French novels is soon
in the position where the "erotic" portions do not assume
for him the vast importance they have for the reader who
merely hunts them out and takes no interest in any other
passages but these.

Bayle, whose Dictionary abounds in many risque
stories, defended himself in an excellent essay called
"Explanation Concerning Obscenities." He said there
very aptly:

"If any one was so great a lover of purity, as to wish
not only that no immodest desire should arise in his
mind, but also that his imagination should be constantly
free from every obscene idea, he could not attain his
end without losing his eyes and his ears, and the re-
membrance of many things which he could not choose
but see and hear. Such a perfection could not be hoped
for, whilst we see men and beasts, and know the signi-
ficance of certain words that make a necessary part of
our language. It is not in our power to have, or not to
have, certain ideas, when certain objects strike our
senses; they are imprinted in our imagination whether
we will or not. Chastity is not endangered by them,
provided we don't grow fond of them."

EROTICISM IN LIFE 25

n

Men may be engaged in philanthropic or political
movements; they may love their work intensely; they
may be consummating an ambition; they may make sac-
rifices in performing their duties; but withal their minds
are pondering on some particular woman, or on women
in general. We hold imaginary conversations with women
we have known, whom we know, or whom we would
like to know. We think about the feminine faces we
meet in the streets, and experience a passing melancholy
because we are unacquainted with some of the girls
we see. Undue interest in the opposite sex is of course
also characteristic of women. They adorn their persons
and choose their styles in dress with the object of physi-
cally attracting the male.

Those who are unhappy in love or marriage do not
find themselves compensated for their misfortune by the
fact that they may possess great wealth, or have a name
that is respected or crowned with glory. The careers of
Lord Nelson and Pamell show that national saviours and
leaders may be engulfed in a grand passion whose for-
tunate outcome may be to them possibly as momentous
as the welfare of their country. The fact that Anthony
was a general on whose move the saving of his country
'depended, did not make him the less interested in
Cleopatra. The fact that Abelard was a philosopher did
not make him hold his studies higher than he did
Heloise. There was really nothing abnormal about these
men. Modern writers have been attracted to them.
Shakespeare chose Anthony as the hero of his play, and
Pope's famous Epistle shows his interest in Abelard. The

26 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

amorous adventures of great military leaders like Caesar
and Napoleon are well known.

The love affairs of many literary men make us almost
conclude that they were more concerned about their
loves than their art. Recall Stendhal's famous cry
about his perishing for want of love or Balzac's eternal
ambition to be famous and to be loved. Goethe once
exclaimed that the only person who was happy was he
who was fortunate in his domestic aSairs. He made
every one of his love affairs the basis of some poem, novel
or play; and not to know anything about his love for
Charlotte Buff, or Frederica or Lili, or Frau von Stein,
is to limit oneself in being able to appreciate Goethe, in
being able to understand Werther, Faust, WUhelm Meis-
ter and other works by him.

And we love these poets and writers who naively con-
fessed that they did not care for aught in life but love,
and who sang of their troubles frankly. Who does not
find Catullus and Tibullus sweet? Who that has read
them does not cherish the lyrical cries of the Troubadours
or the poems of the Chinese poets of the T'ang period?
Can any one help thinking of Burns or De Musset with-
out affection and sympathy? And there are many who
would not surrender the great body of sonnets and
lyrics of England's poets for her colonies. And why is
this? Because these poets are ourselves speaking for
us and saying what we feel but are unable to express.
The cry of the mediaeval Persian or Japanese poet is our
own cry. His joy is ours and he is we and we are he.
Once a poem has left its author's pen it is no longer
a mere personal record, but becomes an enduring monu-
ment of art in which millions of men discern a grief or
gladness that they too have known. In a measure,
literature is more real and eternal than life itself. It

EROTICISM IN LIFE 27

makes the past live and it holds a soul that can sway
millions of people for ever and ever. As Cicero said in
his speech for Archias the poet: "If the Iliad had not
existed, the same tomb which covered Achilles' body
would also have buried his renown."

in

A comprehension of the erotic in ourselves will help
us discern many false ideals connected with the treat-
ment of love in literature. I refer especially to the ideal
of a first and only love (regarded by the lover usually
as Platonic) which has been spread by deceptive authors
and which has produced much affectation and insincerity
in literature.

In real life people do not generally marry their first
loves; they often cherish contempt for persons once
loved; they do not as a rule go through life always claim-
ing that they loved once and that they would never love
again. On the contrary, they usually marry and settle
down and forget about their early affairs, although in
most cases these have lasting influence.

If poets, however, were to speak in a prosaic manner
of their early loves, their works would be less admired.
The public loves loyalty and hence it encourages love
literature that is over-sentimental and false. No doubt
when a man contracts an unhappy marriage or does
not succeed in winning love later in life he looks back
upon an early love affair with tenderness. And while
it is true that the past always rules us we are often sat-
isfied as to the manner in which it shaped our futures.
Robert Browning had an early sad love affair which
influenced his Patdine and indeed many of his later
lyrics, but he was happy in the love of the poetess Eliza-

28 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

beth Barrett. Mark Twain's married life was ideal and
happy, in spite of an early love affair of his which ended
because of the accidental non-delivery of a letter. On
the other hand Byron, who was unhappily married,
cherished the love of his early sweetheart Mary Cha-
worth for over twenty years. Strangely and unjustly
enough he has been accused of insincerity and posing,
and most critics refuse to admit that many of his later
love poems were written to her.

There are two conspicuous instances in literature
where a poet's love was thought by himself to have
lasted for life, the cases of Dante and Petrarch. If the
loves of these Italians for their mistresses are strictly
investigated, I think it will be discovered that they have
hoodwinked the world about their loves. They wrote
their best poems about their beloved ones, after these
had died, and death often makes a man unwittingly
write falsely about the past. Pfister tells us in his
Psychoanalytic Method of a diseased man of fifty who
lived apart from his wife in the same house, and who
treated her brutally. After her death he always insisted
that they were an ideal couple. Pfister relates another
story of a widower who recalled only the happy part of
his unhappy married life, and thought he never could
marry again.

There has always been a suspicion among some people
about the durability of the love felt by Dante and
Petrarch, for Beatrice and Laura respectively. Symonds
says of Laura: "Though we believe in the reality of
Laura, we derive no clear conception either of her person
or her character. She is not so much a woman as woman
in the abstract. . . .The Canzoniere is therefore one
long melodious monotony poured from the poet's soul,

EROTICISM IN LIFE 29

with the indefinite form of a beautiful woman seated in
a lovely landscape." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.
XXI, P. 314.)

Petrarch was twenty- three years old in 1327 when he
met Laura. She died twenty-one years later. Petarch
survived her twenty-six years, dying in 1374. Petrarch,
it should be mentioned, had two illegitimate children bom
by a mistress before Laura's death; they were later legiti-
mised. The poet probably at times felt the pangs of
disprised love to the extent that he claims he did in his
sonnets; he may have experienced the grief he describes
he suffered in his sonnets. But that he was in the con-
stant throes of love for her for forty-seven years is doubt-
ful. He probably was projecting that ideal of faithful
love to please the public; he offered himself as the type
of hero the public likes; a faithful, steadfast lover. It
was this kind of ideal that made so great a genius like
Thomas Hardy gratify the public taste by portraying
so unswerving a lover as Gabriel Oak in Far From the
Madding Crowd.

The case of Dante is an even more noteworthy ex-
ample of literary affectation and self-delusion. His love
is the most astonishing in history. He and Beatrice
were each only nine years old when he saw her. He
probably saw her once after that. She died in 1290,
when the poet was twenty-five years old. Great as
Dante's sorrow was, it did not prevent him from marry-
ing two years later. Dante makes Beatrice the heroine
of his Divine Comedy, or at least of the Paradiso. His
platonic affection for her is so unnatural that one feels
he was doing what Petrarch did, unconsciously creat-
ing an ideal and depicting as permanent an emotion, that
had really brief sway.

30 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

Although it is true that their past love affairs may
have ruled them for life, neither Dante nor Petrarch
were the faithful lovers they would have us believe they
were.

CHAPTER III

DREAMS AND LITEEATUEE

Freud discovered that dreams were the royal road "^
to tJie unconscious, in that they portrayed our most dar-
ing and immoral wishes as actually fulfilled. It is not
necessary that we actually have those wishes in our
waking life; it is sufficient if they merely intruded them-
selves upon us against our wills sometime in the past.
Jhe dream will express our inmost thoughts. It will
y^ise symbolical language to let us still remain in the dark
about our painful desires; but the psychoanalyst can
learn what these are. As a result, when we have re-
vealed to us what unconscious emotions are at the bot-
tom of our nervous disturbances, we may be eased of
them.

Many writers on dreams, in the past, understood that
they referred to events of our daily life, but the exact
relation was not seen. The ancients were especially
interested in the phenomena of dreams. Many ancient
histories and fairy tales abound in narrations and in-
terpretations of dreams.

Modem literary men also have paid a great deal of
attention to them. There are essays on dreams by
Locke, Hobbes, Thomas Browne, Addison, Leigh Hunt,
Dickens, Emerson and Lafcadio Hearn.

31

32 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

One English writer who gave almost complete ex-
pression to the views of Freud was William Hazlitt. In
his essay "On Dreams" in The Plain Speaker, he stated
the theory. It may come as a surprise to Freud — prob-
ably as a greater surprise than when he learned that
Schopenhauer had written about repression — to read the
following passage:

"There is a sort of profundity in sleep; it may be
usefully consulted as an oracle in this way. It may be
said that the voluntary power is suspended, and things
come upon us as unexpected revelations, which we keep
out of our thoughts at other times. We may be aware
of a danger that we do not choose, while we have the
full command of our faculties, to acknowledge to our-
selves; the impending event will then appear to us as
a dream and we shall most likely find it verified^ after-
wards. Another thing of no small consequence is, that
we may sometimes discover our tacit and almost un-
conscious sentiments, with respect to persons or things
in the same way. We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
The curb is taken off from our passions and our imagi-
nation wanders at will. When awake, we check these
rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams
when we are off our guard, they return securely and
unbidden. We make this use of the infirmity of our
sleeping metamorphoses, that we may repress any feel-
ings of this sort that we disapprove in their incipient
state, and detect, ere it be too late, an unwarrantable
antipathy or fatal passions. Infants cannot disguise
their thoughts from others; and in sleep we reveal the
secret to ourselves." [The italics are mine.]

Freud's work may almost be called a commentary on
this extraordinary passage of one of England's greatest
critics.

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 33

Let us examine a few dreams, actual and artificial,
in literature, emd we will note that they show method
in their madijess, that they are ways of expressing the
person's unconscious desires.

In his astonishing essay, "A Chapter on Dreams,"
Stevenson has shown us how dreams influence author-
ship. He tpUs us how the "Brownies," as he calls the
powers that make the dreams, constructed his tales;
however he often had to reject some of these stories
because of their lack of morals. As we remarked above,
wicked dreams are dreamt even by virtuous people^'
since the material is drawn from the psychic life of
our infancy and primitive ancestors. Stevenson relates
how his famous tale Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was sug-
gested by a dream.

Stevenson, in his essay, relates a dream wherein un-
wittingly he lays bare much about some past experience
in his life. He found it too immoral he says to make
a tale of it. But he did immoral things in his dream;
these were related to certain wishes in his waking hours.
Those who are familiar with an episode in Stevenson's
life, that relating to his marriage, and with Freud's the-
ories, will find no difficulty in interpreting the dream and
seeing how the dream and the events in his life which
gave rise to it, tally with one another, when the Freudian
method is applied. In fact the truth of Freud's views
could be established alone by the interpretation applied
to this dream.

Stevenson dreamed that he was the son of a rich wick-
ed man with a most damnable temper. He (the son)
lived abroad to avoid his parent, but returned to Eng-
land to find his father married again. They met and
later in a quarrel the son, being insulted, struck the
father dead. The step-mother lived in the same house

34 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

with the son, who was afraid she detected his guilt. Later
he discovered her near the scene of the murder with
some evidence of his guilt. Yet they returned arm in
arm home and she did not accuse him. Once he searched
all her possessions for that evidence she had found of
his guilt. She returned and he met her and asked her
why she tortured him; "she knew he was no enemy to
her." She fell upon her knees and cried that she loved
him. Stevenson comments that it was not his tale but
that of the little peoples, the brownies. Stevenson was
mistaken; it was his tale. Everything that happened in
that dream had a raison d'etre. Let us see why he
dreamt this immoral dream and interpret it in the light
of its own facts and those his biographer relates.

In early youth Stevenson was a free-thinker and had
difficulties with his father. In 1876, at the age of twenty-
six, he met his future wife, Mrs. Osbourne, who was not
yet divorced from her husband. The elder Stevenson
was opposed to the match. Robert Louis had travelled
extensively; he went to France before he took his mem-
orable trip to California to be near the object of his
love. Mrs. Osbourne obtained a divorce and married
Stevenson in 1880. Thus after four years of suffering
and the removal of three great obstacles, the married
state of his beloved, the objection of his father and fi-
nancial troubles, the novelist was happily united to the
woman he loved. Mrs. Osbourne's first husband re-
married and Stevenson's father died in 1887. Stevenson
and his father became reconciled, and on the latter's
death, Stevenson was so shocked that he had many
nightmares of which in all likelihood this dream was
one. The essay containing the account of this dream
was published in January, 1888, in Scribner's Magazine,
and is included in the volume Across the Plains issued

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 35

in 1892. When the dream occurred I cannot say; it
may have been between the date of his father's death
on May 8, 1887, and the end of the year, by which time
the essay had been written. It may have been dreamed
even before the marriage in 1880, or thereafter while
the elder Stevenson was alive. The interpretation is not
affected. The state of mind, however, which gave birth
to the dream is that in which he was before his wife was
divorced and while his father was opposed to him.

Two men were in the way of Stevenson's marriage —
his father and his loved one's husband, Mr. Osbourne.
Stevenson wanted these men out of the way; they were
the obstacles to his happiness. He wished that Mr.
Osbourne were divorced and he entertained bitterness
towards his father for showing such animosity to the
match. Now we are not accusing Stevenson of a crime
when we say that unconsciously the thought may have
come to him if one or both of these men were dead
his road to marriage would be easy. The dream of the
murder of the father by the son is understood by all
Freudians. It is not an uncommon one, especially
where there is ill feeling between son and father, or
where an over-attachment exists for the mother. It
has its origin psychically in infancy when the father
was looked upon as a rival of the infant in the affec-
tions of the mother, and the dream is given additional
grounds for its entry when the relations between father
and son continue or grow strained. It represents just
what it portrays, the wish of the child for the father
to be out of the way, or dead. When the child wishes
some one dead he means he wants him absent; he has
no conception of death. The dream of murdering one's
own father then is evidence of hostile feeling entertained
by the dreamer to his father either in infancy, where it

36 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

is always entertained, or later in life. It represents a
wish of the unconscious fulfilled, the removal of an ob-
stacle to happiness. Needless to say it does not rep-
resent a conscious desire on the part of the dreamer in
his waking hours to kill his father.

We know how strained Stevenson's relations with his
father were. The elder Stevenson was not ssmipathetic
to his son's liberal ideas and later he opposed him in his
lovemaking. Two more serious oppositions to a young
man, one to the inclinations of his intellect and the
other to his love, can not be imagined. The novelist
never realised what the feature of the murder of his
father in his dream meant, and how it arose. If in
his dream his father appeared as rich and wicked with
a damnable temper, that is what Stevenson really
thought his father was. In the dream the son lived
abroad to avoid the father, and this Stevenson also
actually did in life, and as a result, by the way, we have
some of his early books of travel, and I dare say if these
were closely examined evidence of his strained relations
with his father would appear.

As we know, in dreams there is considerable distor-
tion, and the person of our dream in an instant becomes
another individual. This occurs in Stevenson's dream.
No doubt the dreamer's father was actually made up of
a combination of the elder Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne,
both of whom Stevenson wished were out of the way.
But a more important distortion takes place, the merging
of the second wife of the dreamer's murdered father
with the married woman in real life whom Stevenson
loved. We recall that in the dream the dreamer lives
with his father's second wife in the house after the
murder, but there is a barrier between them, for the
dreamer is haunted by the woman's possible knowledge

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 37

of his guilt. He loves her really and they return arm in
arm from the scene of the murder. He did not want
her to know that he had committed the murder because
he wanted to marry her. He searched her possessions
for the evidence of the guilt she found and then bursts
out asking why she tortures him, he is not an enemy
of hers; that he really loves her, is implied. She also,
it appears, had loved him and makes confession of the
fact. No doubt this scene must be largely a picture of
the proposal of Stevenson to his future wife. The situa-
tion depicted showing the feeling of guilt the dreamer
has for his murder may be traced to his own guilty
thoughts in actual life on account of his unconscious
wishes for both husband and father to be out of the
way. These feelings appear in the remorse of the mur-
derer and in his suspicion of discovery by the woman
he loves. We might trace the dream to much earlier
material in Stevenson's life if we knew all the facts.
We do know that he had an earlier love affair in youth
in which he was disappointed and that he has left us
poems celebrating that episode.

The dream concludes with the implication that the
dreamer and the step-mother marry as they had con-
fessed their love to one another; there are no longer any
remorses or fears on one side or suspicions on the other,
and the obstacles to the marriage, the objections of the
dreamer's father, the legal ties of the husband to the
beloved woman, have been removed. Stevenson wanted
all this to happen in real life and kter it incidentally did
turn out that way. Both his father and the husband of
Mrs. Osbourne were removed as barriers, the former by
acquiescence and forgiving, the latter by divorce. The
dreamer represents as fulfilled his wish to marry Mrs.
Osbourne, with all opposition removed. The dreamer's

38 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

father is both the elder Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne,
the father and the husband respectively, made one in the
dream; the second wife of the father, step-mother of the
dreamer, becomes Mrs. Osbourne, Stevenson's love who
became a wife a second time. Thus we have had what
Freud calls condensation and displacement in the dream.
The dream sheds much light on the most important
period of his life; it fits in with the facts left us by
the biographer. We see what his repressed wishes were
in those days and how they appeared realised in his
dream.

n

Freud first applied his theory of dream interpretation
to fiction in 1907 in his study of Jensen's Gradhia

(1903)-

Freud might have analysed Gautier's story Arria
Marcella instead of Jensen's Gradiva, which was obvi-
ously suggested by the plot of Gautier's tale. Arria
Marcella appeared in 1852, over fifty years before Jen-
sen's story. It gives one a good opportunity for study-
ing Gautier himself and is an effective corroboration of
Freud's theories on dreams.

Octavius sees in a museum a piece of lava that had
cooled over a woman's breast and preserved its form.
He falls in love with the original woman, though he
knows she is dead. He is a fetich worshipper and is
enamoured of emcient types of women preserved in
art; he has even been cast into ecstasy by the sight of
hair from a Roman woman's tomb. He dreams of the
"glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was
Rome." He is a pagan and loves form and beauty. In
his dream that night he is transported to the year of the
eruption of Vesuvius and witnesses a performance of a

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 39

play by Plautus in a Roman theatre. Here he sees the
real woman whose shapely breast had preserved its form
in the lava that killed her. She also sees him and
loves him. Her slave leads him to her home. She is a
Roman courtesan and her name is Arria Marcella. She
tells him that she has come to life because of his desire ,
at the museum to meet her in life. His wish in waking
life is fulfilled in his dream. As a matter of fact, as the
poet comments, art preserves as alive all the beauty of
antiquity.

Octavius realises his wish and, soon, kisses and sighs
are heard. But the charm is soon dispelled, for a Chris-
tian man comes in who reproaches her, even though she
did not belong to his religion. She refuses to abandon
Octavius, but the Christian, by an exorcism, makes Arria
release Octavius, who awakens and swoons. He loved
her for the rest of his life and when he married later, in
memory he was unfaithful to his wife, for he always
thought of Arria.

The meaning of all this is obvious. It is an expression
of Gautier's favourite theory that Christianity is hostile
to love and beauty, and has deprived the world of much
of the greatness of paganism. But there is more here
than Gautier himself imagined. First, the story like all
t/flreams is a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious. Not
only the girl but the world of her time becomes a real-
ity and Octavius lives in his dream in the pagan world.
There are the moments of anxiety where the Christian
interferes and hinders the satisfaction of Octavius's love.
Freud's theory is that an anxiety dream is formed when a
repressed emotion encounters a strong resistance.

Now Octavius is Gautier, who makes a work of art out
of the dream, preserves it for humanity and gives us a

40 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

valuable thing of beauty. Gautier makes up for the
ugliness of to-day by preserving the beauty of the past.
Gautier satisfies his longing for the old pagan world
now vanished by making his hero live in it and realise
the love of one of its courtesans.

This story reveals the author as much as his Madarft-
• oiselle de Maupin does. We have the same Gautier for
whom only the material world existed, the Gautier who
was obsessed by sex, hated Christianity and worshipped
art alone. The trained psychoanalyst who wishes to go
deep into the unconscious of Gautier will, I think, find
some perverse qualities like fetichism, revealed not only
in this tale but in others.

Gautier pursues the motive of this story in several
other tales. He lives constantly in his fantasies amidst
the beauties of the ancient world. It is hard to believe
that many of his tales of phantom love scenes laid in
ancient times were not actually dreamed by him.

His novel, The Mummy's Foot, his stories. The Golden
Chain, One of Cleopatra's Nights, King Candaules, and
two that are considered his best. The Dead Leman and
The Fleece of Gold, show the unconscious worshipper of
physical beauty in Gautier. All these stories may be
analysed like dreams, for they are creatures of the
author's imagination whereby he consoled himself for
the loss of the pagan world. He was really a pagan
transported into our time and he lived those times over
in his stories.

m

Kipling's dream story The Brttshwood Boy is a very
good confirmation of Freud's theories. We will analyse
it psychoanalytically; it will be seen that the artificial

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 41

dream in it is inspired by the same causes as real
dreams are. The story was published in the Century
Magazine, December, 1895, and appeared in book form
in 1901, a year after Freud's great work on Dreams had
been issued. Kipling had no knowledge of Freud's
theories, but he shows his hero suffering an unconscious
repression; Georgie saw for many years visions of a girl
he had met in childhood and apparently forgotten. He
dreamed of her often and these dreams give us an insight
into the hero's anxieties and longings.

Georgie, the Brushwood Boy, dreamed at the age of
three of a policeman. At the age of six he had both
day and night dreams which always began with a pile
of brushwood near the beach. There was a girl he
saw at the pile of brushwood who merged with a prin-
cess he saw in an illustration of Grimm's Faky Tales.
He called her Annie-an-louise. At the age of seven he
saw at Oxford, on a visit, a girl who looked like the
child in the illustrations of Alice in Wonderland, and he
iiirted with her. He went to India as a young man. In
his dreams he saw the old policeman of his infant dreams,
who was saying, "I am Policeman Day coming back from
the city of Sleep." One day in a dream he stepped
into a steamer, and saw a stone lily floating on the
water. He met the same girl of his early dreams at the
Lily Lock and they took a pony on the Thirty Mile
Road. He often dreamed of her and in his dreams was
happy when with her and unhappy when away from
her. When he got back to England he heard a girl guest
at his house sing a song of Policeman Day and the City
of Sleep, and he guessed that it was she who wrote
the music and composed the song. Her name was Miss
Lacy; she was the girl he met as a child at Oxford. He
took a ride with her and each found that the other had

42 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

dreamed the same dreams. She knew all about the
Thirty Mile Road and she had once kissed him in his
sleep. At that very moment he had dreamed that she
had bestowed the kiss. Each had cherished the other
as an ideal, now to be realised, in marriage.

What is the meaning of this story? How did Georgie
come to love a girl he had known apparently only in
his dreams? Where does the Policeman come in an3
what is the secret of the dream journeys on the Thirty
Mile Road? Georgie's dreams were the fulfilment of
his unconscious desires in waking life. He had actually
seen his love in his childhood, was attracted towards her
but apparently forgot about her. But the love was there
nevertheless; it was repressed. He neither knew why he
dreamed of her nor did he believe she actually existed. He
conjured her up in the books he read and identified her
with the princess of the fairy tales. Like the neurotic pa-
tient he did not know the cause of his anxieties; he could
not fit altogether in the scheme of life; he was dreaming
inexplicable dreams which were having an effect upon
him in his waking hours. In a case like this we know
that the dreams have a reality that makes them almost
equivalent to events of the day. When he took those ,
trips with her in his sleep he was fulfilling the uncon-x/
scious wishes of his waking life. He suffered nightmares
when anything interfered to take him away from her.
The anxiety dream as Freud has explained shows that
there has been an interference with the satisfying of the
love desire.

Policeman Day is the cause of terror because he rep-
resents the time when the dreams do not occur, day
time, when he becomes the symbol of love unrealised, for
in the day Georgie is no longer with his love. Police-
man Day is consciousness opposed to unconsciousness,

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 43

reality opposed to illusion. Miss Lacy also felt this
when she sang the song with the refrain,

Oh pity us ! Ah, pity us !

We wakeful ! Oh, pity us !

We that go back with Policemati Day

Back from the City of Sleep.

She also was with Georgie in her dreams and dreaded
waking. He also was present in her unconscious and
she never really forgot the boy she had met as a child,
although she had no conscious memory of him. Their
injfantile impressions were powerful and ruled them
all the time till they met again. They dreamed they
were with each other because they wanted to be with
each other. He guessed she wrote the poem because she
had felt as he did. The poem was an anxiety poem,
voicing the unconscious desire to be with the loved
one. It represents the state of mind of both lovers; he
had also felt the sentiments of the poem, but she put
them in words. When he came back to England he
was unconsciously going to find the ideal of his dreams,
the original Annie-an-louise. When he found her he was
cured of his dreams and anxieties. Their meeting acted
like a cure for their mysterious longings. All their dreams
were made up of infantile fantasies and represented re-
pressions. The marriage satisfies these repressions.

I dare say Kipling was his own model for the Brush-
wood Boy.

This disposes of any interpretations based on mere
mental telepathy between George and Miss Lacy. They
had the same feelings because they suffered the same
repression and had met and loved each other in infancy.

Among other dream stories by Kipling, two of the
best are They and The Dream of Duncan Parrenness,

44 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

IV

Brandes said in his book on Shakespeare:

"As, knowing the life and experiences of the great
modern poet, we are generally able fo trace how these
are worked upon and transformed in his works, it is
reasonable to suppose that in olden times poets were
moved by the same causes, acted in the same way, at
least those of them who have been efficient. When we
know of the adventures and emotions of the modern
poet, and are able to trace them in the productions of
his free fancy; when it is possible, where they are un-
known to us, to evolve the hidden personality of the
poet arid — as every capable critic has experienced — to
have our conjectures finally borne out by facts revealed
by the contemporary author, then we cannot feel it to
be impossible, that in the case of an older poet, we might
also be successful in determining when he speaks ear-
nestly from his heart, and in tracing his feelings and
experiences through his work, especially when they are
l}nical, and their mode of expression passionate and
emotional."

Just as we can build up a picture of a modem author
from dreams he reports, we can do the same with ancient
authors.

I have tried to build up a portrait of the author of
the Achilles-Patroclus episodes in the Iliad, from a dream
repeated there — that of Achilles in the twenty-third book.
It is remarkable that no portrait of Homer, or whoever'
was the author of the books dealing with Achilles, has
thus far been constructed. Whether we assume that
one man or more wrote the Iliad, we may draw one in-
evitable conclusion: That the parts of the poem in which

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 45

Achilles figures contain the clue to the author of those
sections. It is assumed generally that Homer wrote
those sections. Homer sang his own troubles through
his hero as a medium. Unconsciously his own traits and
personality crept in. The great tragedy of Achilles's
life was the death of his friend Patroclus; his master
passion was friendship. It does not require psychoanaly-
sis to detect beneath the great grief of the warrior,
Homer's own despair. The poet sings of the bereave-
ment of his hero in too poignant a strain for any one
to doubt that in Patroclus he was not bewailing some loss
of his own. We need not hesitate in saying, to judge
by the manner in which the poet treats of friendship,
and writes of it with his heart's blood as it were, that
some friendship was the crown of Homer's existence. He
no doubt also suffered a terrible crisis when he lost his
friend, as is only too apparent, through parting or by
death. When the blow befell him, he was drawn to the
one incident of the many in connection with the Trojan
war, the legend centring around Achilles and Patroclus.
Why did he not choose some other feature of which there
were so many and with which other poets dealt? The
very choice of the subject apart from the internal treat-
ment furnishes the proof he could not help but choose
that which interested him most because of some experi-
ence in his own life. He had now an opportunity of reg-
istering his sorrows and adding personal matters while
singing his tale. Life had become empty to him and his
only consolation was to put his pangs into song. He even
wished to die.

The key to these deductions is furnished by a sec-
tion of the twenty-third book, of about fifty lines, of
which John Addington Symonds says, "There is surely
nothing more thrilling in its pathos throughout the whole

46 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

range of poetry." Achilles sees Patroclus in his dreams,
who recalls to him their youthful days and asks io be
buried with him and foretells Achilles's own death. The
warrior promises to grant his friend's requests and
pleads: "But stand nearer to me, that embracing each
other for a little while, we may indulge in sad lamenta-
tion." Achilles tried in vain to touch him, and told his
comrades afterwards: "All night the spirit of poor
Patrodus stood by me, groaning and lamenting, and en-
joined to me each particular and was wonderfully like
unto himself." All this has too authentic and personal
a touch for any one not to feel that Homer was re-
porting a dream of his own and was attributing it to
Achilles. The poet had also spent restless nights and
saw his dead friend before him "wonderfully like unto
himself"; the dream was very vivid to him, and more
so if as tradition reports he was blind.

No indeed. Homer was no mere spectator reciting
Achilles's troubles in an objective manner. He had a
great sorrow of his own and he did not go out of the
way to counterfeit one. He sang his own loss; he told
his own dream; Achilles was the medium through which
he told the world of his own troubles. Patroclus's proph-
ecy that Achilles would die soon shows that Homer
after his loss had wished he too would die, and Homer
must have dreamt that his own end would come soon, in
accordance with the principle that we often dream as
happening or about to happen what we wish to take
place. He saw his friend in his dream just as we all do
because we wish our friends to be still with us. This
dream then is the clue to the tragedy of Homer's life.

So Homer had loved a friend and suffered. Like Pa-
troclus, he hoped his friend wanted to be buried with
him; at least Homer wanted to have his own bones

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 47

repose near those of his friend. What the nature of
the friendship was we cannot say; it may have been
homosexual, a love which was common among the later
Greeks. But it did have the element of passion. We
know now the chief event of Homer's life. What the
details were we cannot say. It is rather unsafe to guess.
But there are a few facts that appear, whose import is
significant. Achilles, we recall, resolved to fight the
Trojans again only because they killed Patroclus. He
was now ready to forget Agamemnon's wrong to him in
depriving him of his captive woman. He knew that by
his new resolve he would lose his life. He was willing
to die for his friend. Homer's love for his friend was
also so great that he too would no doubt have given
up his life for him. This I believe establishes the pas-
sionate element in the friendship of both warrior and
poet.

Again, Achilles blames himself for Patroclus's death.
Had he not withdrawn from the fight, the Trojans would
not have gained any victories and not have killed his
friend. In short, he had been too sensitive, proud and
sulky; he had been too easy a prey to anger and revenge.
Now he was suffering remorse. This indicates that
Homer had quarrels with his friend. We know by
psychoanalysis that people who lose by death a loved
one feel guilt stricken if in life they had hostile
wishes against the person ; in fact they attribute the death
to these secret emotions. The remorse is a reaction to the
hostile wishes, and it is possible, but I do not wish to
press this point, that Homer's friend was either ostra-
cised or shunned by many for some idiosyncrasy or
event in his past life for which he was not to blame
and hence the poet loved him the more. Patroclus re-
minds Achilles in the dream that as a child, he, Pa-

48 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

troclus, had killed a playmate. This detail would not
have been invented by a poet writing impersonally.
Homer thought of some event in the life of his own
friend.

But the real deduction nevertheless remains I believe
unassailable, that the master passion of Homer's life was
friendship, that Achilles contains much of the poet un-
consciously and that many of the moods and passions
given to him were Homer's own. Homer also suffered
a terrible loss and sang of it by emphasising the despair
of Achilles at Patroclus's death which made him forget
Agamemnon's wrong. The great warrior's calamity was
to him a sadder blow than the loss of his captive woman,
with whom he had fallen in love, proving that with
Homer, as with Achilles, friendship was stronger than
the love passion. The fact that so little of love appears
in the Iliad has often excited comment. It is true the
war was fought on account of a woman, but there is
almost_ nothing oLxomautic-Jov-e..m.jyb£_ppem. This' is
because Homer had probably never felt love as he had
known friendship. That love as a tender emotion exist-
ed, we know from the lyric poems written not very long
after Homer. If a man writes works in which he says
so little about love for women, it may be because he
has never had such love. That Homer was altogethef
indifferent about women, however, is not likely. Some
critic will some day study the women in Homer from a
psychoanalytic viewpoint. Women figure more in the
Odyssey; it is unlikely that the same man wrote both
poems; and Samuel Butler has tried to prove that the
Odyssey was written by a woman. This is not so absurd
as it seems; at any rate some woman's influence made
itself felt in the writing of that poem.

DREAMS AND LITERATURE 49

It is only right to conclude that the same motives
and principles of singing which actuated later poets
prompted the earlier ones. If Milton appears in Lucifer,
Goethe in Faust and Mephistopheles, Shakespeare in
Hamlet, there can be no question Homer has drawn
himself in Achilles and an intimate friend of his in
Patroclus.

After having formed this theory, I discovered the i
following significant passage in Plato's Republic, Book \
X, "For we are told that even Creophylus neglected )
Homer singularly in his lifetime." "^

There are thousands of dreams, actual and artificial,
reported in literature and history. Many of these may
be analysed, but in most of them sufficient data are
lacking to help us with the analysis. There are entire
books cast in the form of dreams. There are Flaubert's
Temptation of St. Anthony, Hauptman's Hannele,
Strindberg's Dream Play, Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird,
and its sequel The Betrothal, Newman's Dream of Ger-
ontius, William Morris's Dream of John Ball. There
are the artificial visions of Dante, Bunyan and Lang-
land. There are dreams recorded in Apuleius, Rabelais,
Chaucer, the Mort D 'Arthur, Swedenborg; in the Bible
and the Talmud; in the histories of Herodotus, Xeno-
phon, Suetonius, Dio Cassius; in Richard III and Cym-
beline, in Paradise Lost and Robinson Crusoe and Haw-
thorne.

The dreams recorded in ancient and mediaeval literaV''
ture are in many cases actual ones. Dreams were form-
erly regarded as being prophetic of the future, but they
only rarely have such value. For this reason most of

so THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the interpretations put on them by ancient sages are
worthless for our purposes. Cicero in his On Divination
has reported many dreams and given us arguments pro
and con regarding their prophetic value. It is to be
hoped that the scientific investigation of Freud into the
interpretation of dreams will not give superstition a new
weapon.

CHAPTER IV

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX AND THE BROTHER AND SISTER
COMPLEX

Freud opened up a new field of dream interpretation
by his discovery of the significance of the remark of
the chorus in Sophocles's (Edipus about men dreaming
of incestuous relations with their own mothers. He saw
this dream referred to the barbarous times in which
such incest actually occurred, and to the infantile af-
fection of the child for the mother. He saw that the
counterpart of this dream was in the mythical material
dramatised by Sophocles of a man murdering his father
and marrying his mother. The dream means that one
wants his mother's love. Herodotus reports a dream
of Hippias who dreamt of incest with his mother. Plato's
Republic, Bk. IX, says that in our dream our animal
nature practises incest with the mother.. Dio Cassius
reports Cjesar had such a dream.

The influence of the writer's attitude towards his
father or mother appears in his literary work. Stendhal
has left us a record of the intense child love he had for
his mother; he hated his father. One can see the re-
sults of these conditions in his life, work and beliefs.
He became an atheist, since people who throw off the
influence of their fathers often cast aside also their be-

51

52 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

lief in a universal father. This also explains largely
the atheism of Shelley, whose relations with his father
were not cordial. The essay on the necessity of atheism
was the cause of Shelley's expulsion from Oxford Uni-
versity.

An extreme attachment to the mother is the nucleus
of future neurosis. If the mother is intensely loved by
her infant son or boy, and then she dies, he will still be
looking for a mother substitute, as it were. Freud's de^
duction about the mysterious smile of the Mona da Lisa
is very plausible; it was in all likelihood the unconscious
reproduction by the artist of his mother's smile which
he rediscovered in another woman.

The best example of the CEdipus Complex in English
literature is to be found, I think, in the poem by Cowper,
On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture. Very few
more touching tributes to a mother have been written.
Cowper's mother died when he was six years old. The
poem was written in 1790, when he was past 58 years.
The poet never married and found a mother substitute
in Mary Unwin, who ministered to his comfort; to her
he wrote a famous sonnet and also the well known lyric.

Cowper wrote the poem celebrating his love for his
mother "not without tears." On actually receiving the
picture he kissed it and hung it where it was the last
object he saw at night and the first that met his eyes
in the morning. In the poem he becomes a child again.
The intervening fifty-two years drop out of his life; he
is back with his mother and he narrates his infantile
impressions. The psychoanalyst who is aware that this
child's affection for his mother is its first love affair,
will observe that Cowper in his poem is giving us remi-
niscences of a childish fantasy that shaped the course of
his whole life. His insanity and fits of depression, his

THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX S3

sentimental and platonic attachments to old ladies, his
religious mania, are apparent, in the germ, in this poem.
The poet recalls the affection and tenderness lavished
upon him by his mother; he relates how he felt at her
death, and was deceived by the maids who told him that
she would return. He again sees her in her nightly visits
to him in his chamber to see him laid away safe to sleep. •
He mentions the biscuits she gave him, dwells on her
constant flow of love and on the way she stroked his
head and smiled. He thus re-lives those days. One
should remember these are the reflections of a man fifty-
eight years old. In his troubles he still looks back to her
for support. He contrasts his position then with his sit-
uation now. He is suffering from depression and the
memory of many griefs. His dead mother is like a bark
safe in port.

"But me scarce hoping to attain that rest,
Always from port withheld, always distressed,
Me howling blasts drive devious, tempests tossed,
Sails ripping, seams opening wide, and compass lost.
And day by day some current's thwarting force
Sets me more distant from a prosperous course."

It of course displeases people to have any association
made between the noblest sentiment, mother love, and
so repulsive a feature as incest. When Freud interpreted
the marriage of (Edipus to his mother both from a his-
torical and psychological point of view, and called at-
tention to the dream in the play where the Chorus men-
tions the most obnoxious dream that sometimes visits
us mortals, that of incestuous relationship with the
mother, he opened up a new field not only in psychology
but in medicine. Psychoanalytic treatment has cured
many people whose neurosis arose from the early at-
tachment to the mother from which they were finally

54 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

freed. Cowper was a victim of the CEdipus Complex;
it was buried in his unconscious and in this poem of his
he shows that the seeds that were sown fifty-two years
ago were still bearing fruit. Literature can hardly fur-
nish so good an example of the influence of the CEdipus
Complex through so great a distance of time.

In this poem Cowper put his hand unknowingly on the
cause of all his troubles, but he never realised it. Had
the poem been written in his twenties instead of his late
fifties, the subliminal process of freeing himself by art
from his (Edipus Complex might have made his life
more pleasant. The fact that the poem was written so
late shows that the unhealthy attachment clung to him
all his life; it ruined him mentally and gave us his
strange personality.

(Freud has shown us that psychoneuroses, like hysteria
and obsessions, have their origin in an infantile overat-
tachment to the parent of the opposite sex, which re-
mains unconscious but nevertheless is an active and dis-
turbing element. It is perfectly natural that this condi-
tion should exist in infancy, but it disappears in the nor-
mal person. If it does not, one's entire life will be in-
fluenced by his inability to overcome the too intense
love for mother or infantile hatred for the father. If a
man has had an unfortunate repression in childhood such
as the early death of a mother he loved intensely, his
destiny in life will be affected. This fact has been un-
derstood by people from time immemorial. If an ab-
normal situation develops like a hatred in childhood for
the mother, the child's life will be in the future shaped
differently from that of most people. People especially
are influenced in the way they react to the world and
to love affairs by the frustration or repression of their
earliest love. If they become writers their literary work

THE (EDIPUS COMPLEX SS

is charged with a certain tone, depending on the nature
of the author's relation with his parents.

By this discovery of Freud's literary criticism receives
a new impetus. Most literary biographers unconscious-
ly worked in accordance with this theory, for they al-
ways stated, where possible, the relations of the writer
to his parents. Freud merely formulated and proved
the truth of the theory.

Why were Schopenhauer and Byron such pessimists?
Among the many causes that later in life contributed to
impart the note of woe and despair to their work, was
the fact that both men were in unusually unhappy rela-
tions with their mothers and their quarrels with them
are matters of literary history. Why are men like
Lafcadio Hearn and Edgar Allan Poe the unhappy
Ishmaelites in literature, with their morbid and weird
ideas? They both lost in infancy or early childhood
mothers to whom they were greatly attached.

Facts like these have great significance. It is not
claimed that other factors do not go into the making of
the man, but his relations with his parents is the earliest
cause in determining his mental, moral and emotional
make up. A man who hates his father sees in many of
his future enemies the image of his father. One who
is overattached to his mother looks unconsciously for
her counterpart, among women, in seeking his mate. He
sees a reminder of his father in those people who in-
terfere with his plans, ambitions and conduct. He
sees the father in the rivals he has in love affairs, just
as in infancy he found in his father his rival in the
affections of his mother. This seemingly absurd and
repellent view has been scientifically demonstrated by
Freud and his disciples so that I refer objectors to it
to their works.

S6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

The influence of step-mothers has always been noted
in ancient times and the amount of material in folk lore
dealing with the effects of step-mothers on the lives of
children is large. We are all familiar with the Cinder-
ella story. Literature is rich in examples of writers
whose step-mothers coloured their lives for them. Strind-
berg's misogyny no doubt dates back to his early dis-
like for his step-mother.

All literary works show between the lines a writer's
early attitude towards his parents. An interesting vol-
ume might be written on the relations of literary men to
their mothers. We would find the mother unconsciously
influencing literary masterpieces. We might find the
misanthropy of Moliere's Le Misanthrope and the cyni-
cism of Thackeray in Vanity Fair each due to the fact
that both these men while boys lost their mothers, though
later personal tragedies influenced them. Thackeray
loved Mrs. Brookfield, a married woman, and Moliere
was married to a coquette.

The fact that the mothers of Coleridge and Dickens
had almost no influence upon them is seen in their work.

The relation of the only child to its parents must be
mentioned here. The studies of both Freud and Brill
in regard to the later neurotic condition of the only
child applies to literary men who were only children.
John Ruskin, although subjected to a strict education,
was petted and spoiled nevertheless like the average only
child. His precociousness made his parents admire and
worship him. He was attached to his "papa" and
"mamma" for the rest of their lives. He was not young
when they died and he preserved the attitude of the
child towards them. His mother lived to a great age.
When he was separated from his wife he returned to

THE (EDIPUS COMPLEX 57

his parents to live. His later tragedy, the unmanly
love for Rose Le Touche, which forms a most humiliating
affair in his life, shows he was a neurotic from childhood.
He was in the later part of his life subject to periods
of psychosis. In his actions he was eccentric; he would
be invited to lecture on art and would give a talk on
economics.

His passions were love of beauty in the early part of
his life, and interest in economic reform in his middle
and old age.

We must always remember he was an only child. In
his autobiography Praeteriia, he refers often to his
"papa" and "mamma."

Alexander Pope, the poet, was also a spoiled child,
though he had a half sister.

The seeds of Browning's optimistic philosophy were
sown in the normal and quiet affection that existed be^
tween him and his mother. There was no mad attach-
ment, no repression, no ill feeling, and hence he never
became an abnormal or morbid poet. He had less neu-
roticism than any of the great English poets of the nine-
teenth century. His optimism was also fostered by his
happy marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.

Freud's theories about the relations of the child to the
parents are borne out whenever we consider the life of a
poet.

n

The birth of a new child also has an influence on the
psychic life of the child. There is also always some-
thing in the relation between brothers and sisters that
affects their lives. Hence the subject of incest in litera-
ture is of paramount import, repulsive as the theme may

5& THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

be.* It has been most exhaustively studied in uncon-
scious manifestations in fictitious characters by Otto
Rank in his Incest Motiv (1912), which should be trans-
lated into English.

The only phase of the subject I wish to touch on here
is the close relationship that prevails in some cases be-
tween brother and sister among authors. The brother
and sister complex, as it may be called, shows its ef-
fects upon the literary work of the writer.

The extreme attachment of Renan to his sister Henri-
etta and of Wordsworth to his sister Dorothy had much
to do with the nature of the literary work of these men.
The attachment explained from the point of view of psy-
choanalysis amounts to this. The affection which each
man has for his mother is transferred to the sister who
is the nearest resemblance to the mother. This new fix-
ation may remain too long and the man hence loves no
other woman. The affection is usually at its height in
youth before the man marries another, in case he does
marry. Both Renan and Wordsworth married after they
were thirty. The incest idea was unconsciously present
but repressed by the natural disgust the men felt as a
result of education and training. In all likelihood had
each of these authors been separated from his sister in
infancy and met her years later in youth, he might have
fallen in love with her.

The effects of this extreme brotherly and sisterly love
have been studied but not yet exhaustively. No doubt
much of the effeminacy of Renan, the gentleness, the
moral tone, the kindliness, we find in his writings was
due to this attachment to his sister. He dedicated his

♦Edgar Saltus has touched on the theme in a few of his
novels, notably The Monster.

THE (EDIPUS COMPLEX 59

Life of Jesus to her. As I show elsewhere he drew him-
self in this book, and his love for his sister was a great
factor in his making Jesus somewhat effeminate. He has
also left a tribute to her in his My Sister Henrietta.

The influence of Wordsworth's sister upon him mani-
fested itself in several ways, one of which is the utter re-
spectability of his poetry, and another the almost total
absence of any reference to love or sex. His sister was
largely responsible for the trend of her brother's mind.
She gave him eyes and ears, as he put it, helped him to
observe nature and was herself a great force in the evolu-
tion of the new poetry. Her influence has been under-
rather than over-estimated. Another reason for the ab-
sence of love poetry in Wordsworth may have been due
to a guilty conscience, as he left an illegitimate daugh-
ter in France, he not being able to marry the mother
for justifiable reasons. Professor Harper first published
the story.

As one might have expected, neither Henrietta Renan
nor Dorothy Wordsworth ever married, though the latter
is said to have been in love with Coleridge.

Charles Lamb, the Gentle Elia, owes probably much
of his quality of gentleness to his sister Mary, "Bridget
Elia." She appears in his famous essays and they col-
laborated together in writing poems and tales. His
kindness was no doubt enhanced by his pity for her un-
fortunate fits of insanity and by the fact that in one
of these fits she had killed her mother.

The love felt for their sisters by Byron and Shelley
made the subject of incest a common topic of discussion be-
tween them. They went so far as to question whether the
law or feeling against marriage between brother and sis-
ter was not a convention based on ungrounded prejudice.
Byron's love for his sister, Mrs. Augusta Leigh, did not

6o THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

create femifiine qualities in him. She was to him a sort
of refuge from the disappointment of other love affairs,
a shelter when public opinion was against him. His
poems to her rank among his best. He may have had
unconscious incest thoughts in regard to her, and he may
have drawn himself as married to her in Cain, where she
may be Cain's sister Adah. But the accusation that By-
ron ever indulged in unlawful relationship with his sis-
ter is a groundless libel. We have no evidence for it
and we have no right to make any assumptions because
of misinterpretations put on his work. Between the
thought and the deed there is a wide gap. Carlyle once
said, the hand is on the trigger, but the man is not a
murderer before the trigger is pulled. The story of the
reputed incest with his sister was first published by Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe. The myth was revived again by
"documentary" evidence furnished by Lord Lovelace, a
descendant of Byron, and published in Astarte. A later
woman biographer, Ethel C. Mayne, accepts the story.
The entire tale is ably demolished by Richard Edggumbe
in his Byron, the Last Phase, where he applies, without
a knowledge of Freud's views, psychoanalytic methods
to Byron. Brandes also defended Byron years ago.

Lord Lovelace published a love letter alleged to have
been written to Augusta Leigh, BsTon's sister, dated May
17, 1819, but this letter was really meant for Mary Cha-
worth, to whom he wrote: "I not long ago attached my-
self to a Venetian for no earthly reason (although a pret-
ty woman) but because she was called . . . and she often
remarked (without knowing the reason) how fond I was
of the name." The name which is crossed out is Mary.
The mistress was the Venetian Mariana (the Italian for
Mary Anne) Segati, the poet's mistress from November,
1816, to February, 1818. He was thus showing Mary

THE (EDIPUS COMPLEX 6i

Chaworth he still loved her. It is not likely he would
try to impress Augusta with his love for a woman named
Mary and again not probable that he would tell his sis-
ter of his liaison when he and his sister were supposed
to love each other. The tone of this letter differs from
that of others to his sister.

In 1820 Byron was writing in his Don Juan that he has
a passion for the name Mary, that it still calls up the
realm of fancy where he beholds what never was to be,
and that he is not yet quite free from the spell. He loved
Mary Chaworth all his life.

Byron's alleged criminal attachment to his sister was
supposed to be the mystery in Manfred's life, revealed by
these words in the second act, when wine is offered to
him:

"'tis blood — my blood! the pure warm stream
Which ran in the veins of my fathers and ours,
When we were in our youth and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love.
And this was shed."

In a poem published a year later, The Dud, there is
also a reference to blood — "And then there was the
curse of blood." This line and the passage in Manfred
merely refer to the fact that an ancestor of Byron, the
fifth Lord, not a direct ancestor, killed Mr. Chaworth
whose blood flowed in Mary's veins. Astarte then in
Manfred is Mary Chaworth and not Augusta.

Shelley had a great affection for his sister Elizabeth
and wanted his friend Hogg to marry her. She returned
to her father and Shelley was broken hearted that she
drifted away from his own influence. He thought she
was not lost- to him and wanted to take her with him
to the west of Ireland in 18 14. He continued to love

62 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

her, and this influenced his work. In the first edition
of the Revolt of Islam he made Laon and Cynthia,
who were brother and sister, lovers. The publisher
made the poet regretfully change certain passages, most-
ly single lines. In the early preface the poet concluded
he could not see why an innocent act like love of brother
and sister for each other should arouse the hatred of
the multitude.

In Rosalind and Helen he describes Helen visiting a
spot where a sister and brother had given themselves
up to one another, and had a child, who was torn by
people limb from limb. The mother was stabbed while
the youth was saved by a priest, to be burned for God's
grace. Their ghosts visited the spot.

CHAPTER V

THE AUTHOR ALWAYS UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK

"No man," says Dr. Johnson in his Lije of Cowley,
"needs to be so burdened with life as to squander it in
voluntary dreams of fictitious occurrences. The man
that sits down to suppose himself charged with treason
or peculation, and heats his mind to an elaborate purga-
tion of his character from crimes which he was never
within the possibility of committing differs only by
the infrequency of his folly from him who praises beauty
which he never saw; complains of jealousy which he
never felt; supposes himself sometimes invited and
sometimes forsaken; fatigues his fancy and ransacks his
memory for images which may exhibit the gaiety of
hope, or the gloominess of despair; and dresses his
imaginary Chloris or Phyllis sometimes in flowers fad-
ing as her beauty, and sometimes in gems as lasting as
her virtues."

The shrewd doctor displayed great insight into the
psychology of authorship in these remarks. They form
a good argument against those who deny the importance
of the personal note in literature.

One objection that these critics make is that an author
may deliberately conceal himself and that in fact writers
have often done so. Thus a man who is happily married

63

64 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

may write a novel or play, seething with attacks upon the
marriage institution, full of cynical and bitter statements
about women and love. The author may say that book
does not represent his own life. It does, however, in that
it shows his reaction to seeing life of this kind lived by
others; it means that he has been struck by the cruelty
or injuctice of it, and that unconsciously he reflected
that he too might but for a chance throw of the dice of
fate be in the same position. His attitude towards the
lives of others is part of his own life. The fact that he
has suffered pain by witnessing other people's lives,
shows that his own psyche is affected. The life de-
scribed has been lived by some of his friends or rela-
tives, and some of his ancestors. The griefs of others
often affect us, if not like our own, at least strongly
enough to make us devote ourselves to mitigating them.
Investigation however will show that the great works
voicing sorrows were experienced by those who wrote
about them. It is an unhappily married writer like George
Sand, who has given us the novels that deal with the mar-
riage problem. It is a disappointed lover like Heine
or De Musset who writes the saddest love poems. Life
is made up of so many sorrows that writers do not have
to go out of their way to invent them. The rich man
does not imagine himself starving and write books
where the pangs of hunger are described. Such litera-
ture is written usually by a man who has starved, a man
like George Gissing. The financier who has never had
any business troubles as a rule will not waste energy
nor court pain by trying to figure how a bankrupt feels
and put those feelings in art. Such feelings are usually
delineated by a man who has himself been bankrupt
like Balzac in his Ccesar Birroteau. Of course, no writer
could have felt all the emotions he describes. Balzac,

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 65

for \^example, never had the troubles of Goriot, for, he
never had children to be ungrateful to him. But even
here there must have been some personal affair, for the
author had suffered from ingratitude of some other kind
and all ingratitude hurts.

The author again may write merely for amusement or
commercial purposes. In these cases it is true the
author's personality may not be in his work any more
than an editorial writer's real opinions are in the edi-
torial which he writes in accordance with the policy of
his paper. A writer may study the demands of the pub-
lic and try to comply with them. In cases like these
the reader may detect the insincerity or learn of it by
dues. Here the works are not representative of the
author and he can no more be judged by them, than a
person who would invent or falsify his dreams in re-
porting them to a psychoanalyst. Certainly these would
not reveal the unconscious. And I realise much "litera-
ture" is of this nature.

An author again may purposely conceal himself, but
the key once discovered reveals him. Deliberate and
continuous concealment by the author of his person-
ality can often be detected. We know Merimee and
Nietzsche were personedly entirely different from what
some of their books would lead us to suspect. Merimee
was not cold nor Nietzsche cruel; one was too emotional
and the other too genteel.

n

A good example of the follies that may follow by the
refusal to adopt psychoanalytic methods in literature
is seen in the case of Charlotte Bronte.

It had always been noticed that several similar mo-

66 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

tives appeared in her novels; the love of a girl for her
school master, a married man; an intense craving for
affection; and pictures of sad partings. It was known
that Charlotte had attended the school of M. Heger,
a married man in Brussels, that she had left it and then
returned, and later departed finally. There were critics
who suspected that Charlotte was really in love with her
teacher and that various, scenes in her novels had their
counterpart in reality. Among these were Sir Wemyss
Reid, Augustine Birrel and Angus Mackay. But other
critics scoffed at the idea. So great a Bronte student
as Clement Shorter said it would be the act of treachery
to pry into the writer's heart. May Sinclair, especially,
repudiated with indignation the possibility that Bronte
drew on actual facts for her novels; and her purposes
in writing her The Three Brontes, was to demolish the
theory that Charlotte Bronte was in love with M. "Heger.
But shortly after this work appeared there were pub-
lished in 1913 in the London Times one of the "scoops"
of the age, four pathetic heart burning love letters by
Charlotte Bronte to M. Heger, written without pride,
pleading for a little affection. The secret was out;
there could be no doubt that the scenes of unrequitted
love in her novels were due to her own unreciprocated
love for M. Heger and that Charlotte was Lucy Snowe
and Jane Eyre in VUlette and Jane Eyre, respectively.
Miss Sinclair wrote an article attacking the publishing of
the letters which had disproved her theory.

An excellent study of the influences of Charlotte's sad
love affair on her work was made by Mrs. Ellis H. Chad-
wick in her In the Footsteps of the Brontes. It is really
a psychoanalytical study, for it traces the novelist's
work to her repressions. Another study has been prom-
ised by Lucille Dooley, who made several abstracts of

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 67

psychoanalytical studies of genius from essays by
Freiid's disciples, in the American Journal of Psychology.

I j\ist wish to point out a few of the influences of
Bronte's love affair upon her work. Charlotte Bronte
published Jane Eyre in October, 1847, ^iid wrote in
1848: "Details, situations which I do not understand
and cannot personally inspect, I would not for the
world meddle with. . . . Besides not one feehng on any
subject, public or private, will I ever affect that I do
not really experience."

After she left Brussels on December 29, 1843, she
wrote that she suffered much and that she would never
forget what the parting cost her. This departure in-
spired the description of the flight from Thornfield
(which is Brussels in Jane Eyre), the part of the novel
which she told her biographer appealed to her most.

In her letters to Heger which were published she begs
for sjmipathy as a beggar for crumbs from the table
of the rich man. In the second letter written in 1844
she tells how she waited six months for a letter and she
sent this one throujgh friends. In VUlette, in the twen-
ty-fourth chapter, she wrote how Lucy Snowe studied
to quench her madness because she received no letters.
"My hour of torment was the post hour." She wrote
that in all the land of Israel there was but one Saul, cer-
tainly but one David to soothe him. Heger was the
David, she says symbolically, to soothe her. (In the
novel Heger is called Paul Carl David Emanuel).

VUlette is the most autobiographical of her novels. It
appeared in the beginning of 1853 and had occupied the
author the previous two years. It cost her great effort
and she recalled in it the sleepless nights in Brussels
about which she told Mrs. Gaskell; her anxieties
were caused by her hopeless love for M. Heger. She knew

68 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

that the novel would be recognised by the Hegers, and
she printed in it a statement that the author reserved
the rights of translation, as she feared M. Heger would
read it if it were translated into French. She first had
wanted to publish it anon3miously. She also refused to
make a happy ending which was wanted by the pub-
lishers; she would not have Paul and Lucy marry, for
such was not the case in real life. (Jane Eyre, however,
married Rochester.) The book is full of the Hegers,
even their children being in it. Madame Heger does not
figure in a favourable light, and one could hardly expect
a girl to admire the wife of the man she loved herself.

The interval between the first and last of the letters
published in the Times is about two years, which covers
the saddest period of her life, the time she left Brussels
finally on December 29th, 1843, ^i^d the end of 1845.
She had gone to Belgium originally in February, 1842;
she was then twenty-six and Heger was seven years her
senior. She left in November, 1842, when her aunt
died, and returned in January, 1843. Heger wanted her
to return and Charlotte was only too eager, though she
could have received a better position. She describes this
second trip in Villette. She left finally because Mme.
Heger really did not want her services.

Charlotte's brother Branwell also fell in love with a
married person, the wife of his employer.

Charlotte Bronte drew herself as a man in her first
novel, The Professor. She calls herself William Crims-
worth, who loves his teacher, Mile. Renter. The account
she gives of the parting of the student with his teacher
is again reminiscent of her memories of parting from M.
Heger. She drew herself then just once in this role of the
male lover.

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 69

"The principal male characters," says Mrs. Chadwick,
"to be found in Charlotte Bronte's great novels were
those drawn from M. Heger, M. Pelet, Rochester, Rob-
ert Moore, Louis Moore and Paul Emanuel."

Hence we may conclude as a rule that when a motive
appears often, or a note persists continuously, in a
writer's work, there were reasons therefor in his per-
sonal life. Charlotte Bronte was no exception to the rule.

She married in 1854 but did not really love her hus-
band. Poor Charlotte Bronte! She married late and
not for love, and all her youth she craved love and
wanted to marry and be a mother. She betrays herself
in a dream reported in the twenty-first chapter of Jane
Eyre. Had she known that dreams are realised uncon-
scious wishes she might never have recounted this dream,
a frequent one among women, both married and unmar-
ried, who have no children.

"During the past week scarcely a night had gone over
my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an
infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes
dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with
daisies on a lawn, or, again, dabbling its hands in run-
ning water. It was wailing this night and laughing the
next; now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from
me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, what-
ever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive
nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of
slumber."

Literature can scarcely present a more personal con-
fession in disguised form. That dream of Jane Eyre's
was Charlotte Bronte's, who wanted to have children by
M. Heger.

70 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

m

The value of the study of an author's works in con-
nection with his life is also seen in the case of Dickens.
An excellent book by Edwin Pugh, Charles Dickens
Originals, really applies the psychoanalytic method, to
a large extent, to Dickens's work.

Some of the main influences in Dickens's life and
work were due to two girls, Maria Beadnell, his boyhood
sweetheart, who rejected him, and Mary Hogartii, his
wife's sister, who died young. These women were re-
spectively the models of Dora in David Copperfield, and
Little Nell.

The story of Dickens's early love became known a
half dozen years ago when his letters to Miss Beadnell
were published. He was eighteen when he loved her,
and when she finally rejected him he wrote to her say-
ing he could never love another. Not long afterwards
he married. In 1855, when he was nearly forty-four
years old, he said in a letter to his future biographer,
Forster, that he could never open David Copperfield
"without going wandering away over the ashes of all
that youth and hope, in the wildest manner." He was
thinking of his love for Maria, for the reference in the
letter is to Dora, of whom Maria was the prototype.
She also appears as Dolly Varden in Barnaby Rudge.
He again draws her in Estella in Great Expectations,
and describes the sufferings that Pip, who is himself,
had undergone on account of her.

In 1855 Maria Beadnell, who had become Mrs. Henry
Winter, wrote to the author, and he agreed to meet,
her clandestinely. He was unhappily married but not yet
separated from his wife. The separation came a few

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 71

years later. Dickens was disillusioned when he met
Mrs. Winter; she was homely and stout. He describes
his disillusionment in Little Dorrit, where Mrs. Winter
is Flora Pinching. "Flora whom he had left a lily, had
become a peony." And then he gives way to a personal
pathetic cry. He could no longer love his first love, he
was not in love with his wife; with all his fame and
wealth he had missed the greatest pleasure in Ufe. "That
he should have missed so much, and at his time of life
should look so far about him for any staff to bear
him company upon his downward journey and cheer
it — was a just regret." He looked into the dying fire
by which he sat and reflected that he too would pass
through such changes and be gone. Thus we can trace
the childwife Dora and the sufferings of Pip to Dickens's
first love.

Mary Hogarth, who helped to shape Dickens's ideals
of women, was a younger sister of his wife, and she died
as a girl. Dickens was so shocked by this that he could
not go on for a while with his Pickwick Papers and
Oliver Twist. This was about 1837, when he was
twenty-five. He has left a number of records of the
great and lasting effect upon him of the grief he felt.
He describes a dream where he sees her; he thinks of
her when in America. She was his model for Little Nell
and he wrote that old wounds bled afresh when he wrote
this story. But she was responsible for all those pure,
bloodless girls, lacking in individuality, which fill his
pages. She died when she was innocent of worldly
guile, and unconsciously was the type before him when
he drew women. He could not understand the modern
intellectual woman and he owes this literary deficiency to
his misfortune. "And so he presents to us," says Mr.
Pugh, "that galaxy of amazing dolls variously christened

72 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

Rose Maylie, Kate Nickleby, Madeline Bray, Little
Nell, Emma Haredale, Mary Graham, Florence Dom-
bey, Agnes Wickfield, Ada Clare and Lucy Manette. . . .
Modern criticism has exhausted itself in scathing de-
nunciation of these poor puppets. And yet there is per-
haps something to be said in defence of the convention
that created them. Dickens was never a self-conscious
artist. He had indeed no use for the word Art." His
female types were the result of his faith in the perfec-
tion of woman as he saw it in Mary Hogarth.

Two women who did not influence his work are his
mother and his wife. He entertained no affection for
either. He had no pleasant memories of his mother be-
cause she was indifferent to his sufferings when he
worked as a boy in the blacking factory. She is drawn
in Mrs. Nickleby. David Copperfield's mother may also
have been, an idealised portrait of Dickens's own mother,
but Mrs. Copperfield resembles more the Little Nells
and other characters based on Mary Hogarth in her
colourlessness, and her goodness. Dickens's own wife
scarcely, if ever, served as a model for any of his female
characters. They lived apart for the last twelve years
of the author's life.

Dickens's greatness lies in his portrayals of male char-
acters. He was poor in his female characterisation be-
cause Mary Hogarth unconsciously influenced him into
drawing spineless women and he kept the painful mem-
ories of his love affair with Maria Beadnell suppressed
except to caricature her in Dora and Estella and Flora.
When we think of Dickens we have memories of men
like Sam Weller, Micawber (Dickens's father), Uriah
Heep, Pecksniff, and others. Why he especially ex-
celled in characterisation of these types familiarly known
all over the world, and how he was led to that peculiar

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 73

"exaggerative" portrayal of eccentric creatures is a
theme which can be explained by psychoanalytic the-
ories and the application of Freud's theories of the
comic, and a study of the originals and the types
Dickens met in his life. It should also be remem-
bered that this style of character portrayal was com-
mon in Dickens's youth, and he also imitated other
writers.

IV

Swinburne has been usually regarded as an imper-
sonal poet, though some of his critics have tried to see
in the accounts of derelictions from the path of virtue
in the poems, records of actual experiences. The poet
has himself written something on the subject. In the
Dedicatory Epistle of 1904 to the collected edition of
his works he wrote: "There are photographs from life
in the book (Poems and Ballads, 1865) ; there are
sketches from imagination. Some which keen-sighted
criticism has dismissed with a smile as ideal or imagi-
nary were as real and actual as they well could be; others
which have been taken for obvious transcripts from
memory were utterly fantastic or dramatic. . . . Friend-
ly and kindly critics, English and foreign, have detected
ignorance of the subject in poems taken straight from
the life, and have protested that they could not believe
me were I to swear that poems entirely or mainly fanci-
ful were not faithful expressions or transcriptions of the
writer's actual experience and personal emotion."

The poet does not tell us which poems were fanciful
and which were not. He does let us know that some of
the poems were the record of his own experience. I
propose to show that many of the poet's best known
poems had a personal background and thus to differ

74 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

with the theory usually prevalent that Swinburne, in-
stead of having sung his own soul, was but a clever
manipulator of rhj^ne and metre. The clue to the in-
vestigation is furnished by our knowledge that one of
his greatest poems in the Poems and Ballads, "The Tri-
umph of Time," was inspired by the one love disap-
pointment of his life. It was written in 1862 when he
was twenty-five years old and "represented with the
exactest fidelity," says Gosse, his biographer, "his emo-
tions which passed through his mind when his anger
had died down, and when nothing remained but the in-
finite pity and the pain." Swinburne met the young lady
at the home of the friends of Ruskin and Bume- Jones,
Dr. John Simon and his wife. She was a kinswoman
of theirs. She gave the poet roses and sang for him.
She laughed in his face when he proposed. He was hurt
grievously and went up to the sea in Northumberland
and composed the poem. The poet told Gosse the story
in 1876.

The poem is a cry of a wounded heart; one of the most
powerful in all literature. The poet recounts all his emo-
tions and foresees that this affair will influence his life.
Many lines in it are familiar to Swinburne lovers, such as
"I shall never be friend again with roses," "I shall hate
sweet music my whole life long." It is one of Swin-
burne's masterpieces and Rupert Brooke considered it the
masterpiece of the poet.

One may now see that the terrible declamation against
love, one of the lengthiest and best choruses in his play
Atlanta in Calydon, rings with a personal note. The
lines beginning "For an evil blossom was born" con-
stitute one of the most bitter outcries against love in
literature. Unconsciously, memories of his lost love
were at work and the diorus must have been written

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 73

about the same time as "The Triumph of Time." The
play itself was published in 1864. Swinburne is the
Chorus and thus chants his own feelings in the Greek
legend he tells.

Swinburne may have had other love affairs though
Gosse tells us this was his only one. I find memories
of the unfortunate episode throughout the entire first
volume of Poems and Ballads, and note recurrences to
the theme in later volumes. In one of his best known
poems, "The Forsaken Garden," written in 1876, he
dwells on the death of love. The idea of love having an
end is repeated with much persistency throughout many
of his poems; he so harps on the same note, that the
suspicions of critics should have been roused before we
learned about the romance of his life. No doubt the
reason he was attracted to the love tragedy of Tristram
of Lyonesse, published in 1882, was because of his own
tragic experience; and in the splendid prelude (written,
Gosse tells us, in 187 1) we see the effects of his love af-
fair.

We have evidence of Swinburne's grief in two of the
greatest poems of the Poems and Ballads, where it was
least suspected, in "Anactoria" and "Dolores," poems
whose morality he had to defend. He pours some light
on the subject in his Notes on Poems and Reviews, pub-
lished as a reply to his critics after the issue of his
Poems and Ballads in 1865. Of "Anactoria" he said:
"In this poem I have simply expressed, or tried to ex-
press, that violence of affection between one and another
which hardens into rage and deepens into despair. . . .
I have tried to cast my spirit into the mould of hers
(Sappho), to express and represent not the poem but
the poet. ... As to the 'blasphemies' against God or
gods of which here and elsewhere I stand accused — they

76 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled
and fruitless passion recoiling on itself."

In other words he was singing his own grief through
Sappho. The rage and despair were Swinburne's own
and the "blasphemies" were his own reaction to frus-
trated love.

On "Dolores," the poet says: "I have striven here to
express that transient state of spirit through which a
man may be supposed to pass, foiled in love and weary
of loving, but not yet in sight of rest; seeking rest in
those violent delights which have violent ends in free
and frank sensualities which at last profess to be no
more than they are."

No doubt the poet gave himself up to light loves as
a result of his disappointment. But the point here to
be remembered is that the poem is by his own confes-
sion a result of a state of spirit through which a "man
foiled in love" (the poet himself) may be said to pass
and through which Swinburne did pass.

Let us examine some of his lyrics, chiefly those in
his first volume where we can see the result of the love
affair.

In "Laus Veneris" he breaks off from his story to
say:

"Ah love, there is no better life than this,
To have known love how bitter a thing it is,
And afterwards be cast out of God's sight."

He spoke here from personal memories.

After he tells the story of "Les Noyades," of the youth
who was bound to a woman who did not love him and
thrown into the river Loire, the poet ends abruptly,
and addresses his own love, regretting that this could
not have happened to him. He re-echoes the sentiment

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 77

in "The Triumph of Time" where he wishes he were
dead with his love. Yet no critic has ventured to see
how Swinburne was drawn to this tale by his uncon-
scious, "by the fact that he had lost his love; and no
critic dreamed of claiming that the following conclud-
ing lines were personal and addressed to the kinswoman
of the Simons:

"O sweet one love, O my life's delight.
Dear, though the days have divided us,
Lost beyond hope, taken far out of sight.
Not twice in the world shall the Gods do this.''

His address to the spirit of Paganism, the "Hymn of
Proserpine," which should not necessarily bring up
thoughts of his love tragedy, nevertheless begins, "I
have lived long enough, have seen one thing, that
love hath an end," and later on he complains that
laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day,
but love grows bitter with treason and laurel outlives
not May. I fear that the poet deserves more sympathy
than he has hitherto been accorded. He had accused
his love of having encouraged him, hence he knew what
he meant when he sang those sad words "love grows
bitter with treason."

Two other pathetic poems are "A Leave Taking"
where he constantly reiterates "she would not love" and
he turns for consolation to his songs; and "Satia de
Sanguine" where he says, "in the heart is the prey for
gods, who crucify hearts, not hands."

In "Rondel" he begins:

"These many years since we began to be
What have the gods done with us? what with me,
What with my love ? They have shown me fates and fears,
Harsh springs and fountains bitterer than the sea."

78 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE
In the "Garden of Proserpine," he sings,

"And love grown faint and fretful.
Sighs and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure."

This poem shows his longing for rest after his sad
experience; he is" tired of everything but sleep.
In "Hesperia" he again refers to his troubles:

"As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it

bruises her bosom,
So love wounds as we grasp it and blackens and burns as a

flame ;
I have loved much in my life ; when the live bud bursts with

the blossom
Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof

shame."

Even in "The Leper" he gives us an inkling of his
great love by describing the devotion of the lover for
the smitten lady. "She might have loved me a little
too, had I been humbler for her sake."

All these poems appeared in his first volume and
were written within at least two years aftej* his sorrow.
He can scarcely write a poem or chant about a woman
or retell an old myth or legend, or venture a bit of
philosophy but he unconsciously introduces his aching
heart. The burden is always that love has an end or
lives but a day. *

There are other poems in the first volume where the
personal note is present and yet very little attention has
been called to this.

The poem "Felise," with its quotation from Villon,
"Where are the Snows of Yesterday," is I believe a per-
sonal poem, based on an actual or desired change be-
tween him and his lost sweetheart, that is, if this poem
refers to her. Some day new data may appear to tell

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 79

us whether the facts of the poem had any basis in real-
ity. It seems that a year after the poet's love was re-
jected by the girl, she wished to win his love back and
that he now scorned her. The poem was written, Gosse
conjectures, in 1864, but 1863 is most likely the date
from the internal evidence, as she rejected him in 1862.
Swinburne refers to the change a year had brought:

"I had died for this last year, to know
You loved me. Who shall turn on fate?
I care not if love come or go
Now, though your love seek mine for mate.
It is too late."

He exults cruelly; in the new situation he is re-
venged.

"Love wears thin.
And they laugh well wrho laugh the last."

He concludes:

"But sweet, for me no more with you I
Not while I live, not though I die.
Good night, good bye."

If she ever sought a return to the poet's affections, he
refused to receive her. He had hoped she might seek
to return; read the following lines from "The Triumph
of Time," where he takes the same stand that he does
in this poem.

"Will it not one day in heaven repent you?
Will they solace you wholly the days that were?
Will you lift up your eyes between sadness and bliss,
Meet me and see where the great lane is.
And tremble and turn and be changed ? Content you.
The gait is strait. I shall not be there."

No, never would he take her back. Whether the in-
cident of her asking to be restored to his affections hap-
pened or not is unimportant, relatively. Sappho prayed

8o THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

to Aphrodite to reverse the situation of her love and
make the rejecting lover come to her suppliant; a situa-
tion that eveiV suffering lover wants, and as we know,
very often happens.

One of the finest poems inspired by his love, "his
sleek black pantheress," is the poem called "At a Month's
End," published in 1878 in the second series of Poems
and Ballads. He recalls the old days and his grief
is not now so maddening. He sighs:

"Should Love disown or disesteem you
For loving one man more or less?
You could not tame your light white sea-mew,
Nor I my sleek black pantheress.

"For a new soul let whoso please pray,
We are what life made us and shall be.
For you the jungle and me the sea-spray
And south for you and north for me."

The late Edward Thomas, killed in the war, was cer-
tainly in error when he concluded that Swinburne did
not directly express personal emotion and that few of
the pieces could have been addressed to one woman and
that he never expressed a single hearted devotion to one
woman except in "A Leave Taking." We need not in-
sist that one woman was always in his mind, but one
woman inspired most of his love passages. New in-
formation may show that other women inspired some of
his love verse.*

Another phase in studying the poet that has interested
readers is whether he actually figured in the light and
lewd loves he sang. This is rather dangerous ground,
and one cannot delve with certainty here. Nor is this

* Among recently published posthumous poems of Swin-
burne is one called "Southward," written no doubt with his
love still fresh in mind.

AUTHOR UNCONSCIOUSLY IN HIS WORK 8i

matter so important as the question of the connection
between a grand passion and the poems. The poet says
in his notes in reply to critics that "Dolores" and
"Faustine" are merely fanciful. Gosse has been cen-
sured for not having written an honest biography and
for having passed over certain episodes in the poet's
life. It had often been rumoured that the poet did lead,
occasionally, a dissipated life. In the late seventies he
was rescued by his friend Watts-Dunton from the ef-
fects of presumable long dissipation. After that time
the poet's life was normal and the publication of the
early poems of passion became a source of regret to him.
He never again returned to that strain and incidentally
rarely wrote work that was equal to his first period.
It may then be true that some light loves and immoral
women inspired poems like "Anima Anceps," "A Match,"
"Before Parting," "Rococo," "Stage Love," "Interlude,"
"Before Dawn," "Faustine," "Dolores," "Fragoleeta,"
"Aholibah," etc.

/ Swinburne then, who of all lyric poets was the one
deemed least to have drawn on his personal life for
material, has done so in great measure.

■" His "Thalassius" gives us his spiritual autobiography.
At the age of fifty-five he recurred to his childhood
scenes and gave us memories of them in his dreima The
Sister (1892) where he drew himself in Clavering. His
The Tale of Balen, published a few years later, is also
personal.

In spite of the fact that the poet elaborated and gave
us such rich verse, he wrote from the unconscious. The
first stanzas of "A Vision of Spring in Winter" were
composed in sleep. He awoke at night and penned the
verses he had composed. His "A Ballade of Dream-

82 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

land" was written in the morning without a halt. Swin-
burne worked from impulse.

Swinburne's affinity to Shelley calls for special
comment. He was attracted to him, because Shelley
too, like Swinburne, hated monarchy and the church, be-
cause he had a mastery over melody in verse, because
he was persecuted. He wrote to his youngest sister
(Leith: Swinburne, Page 221): "I must say it is too
funny — not to say uncanny — ^how much there is in com-
mon between us two; bom in exactly the same class,
cast out of Oxford — the only difference being that I
was not formally but informally expelled — and holding
and preaching the same general views in the poems
which made us famous." This is a good illustration
of the process of projection in literature. Swinburne
was attracted to Shelley because he was most like him.

The influence of his mother, Jane Swinburne, was a
determining factor in his life. She guided his reading
and took care of him and he was mentally a good deal
like her. He was very much attached to her and no
doubt she unconsciously is present in much of his work.
She died in 1896 when eighty-seven years old and her
death left him a changed man and was the tragedy of
his later life. When she came to live with him before
her death he wrote a poem of welcome to her, "The
High Oaks," and when she died he wrote "Barking
Hall."

CHAPTER VI

UNCONSCIOUS CONSOLATORY MECHANISMS IN
AUTHORSHIP

There is a large body of popular literature that may v
be called the literature of self-deception. The author
makes statements that are false, but which he wants
to be true. He is awaxe, too, that most people like these
sentiments, and he gives a forceful expression to them
so that they have a semblance of truth. Dr. Johnson
once said that all the arguments set forth to prove the
advantages of poverty are good proof that this is not
so; you find no one trying to prove to you the benefits
of riches.

The literature of self-deception, which is nearly al-
ways optimistic and consolatory, derives its value as a
defence mechanism. It is based on a lie but is effica-
cious nevertheless. Of this species Henley's famous
poem ending with lines "I am Master of my fate, I am
Captain of my soul" is a good example. Of course no
one is master of his fate. To this class belongs much
of the consolatory advice found in the stoical precepts
of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Most reli-
gious poems and works like The Imitation of Christ may
be included here.

Many writers whose lives have been sad, have written
83

84 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

works that buoyed them up. They have affected to
learn much from their calamities, although they unques-
tionably would have preferred not to have been victims
of these misfortunes. They have pretended to exult
over the failures of their ambitions when at heart they
would have wished a more successful termination to
them. Naturally literature of this kind is popular, al-
though any vigorous intellect can see through the fal-
laciousness of the reasoning in a poem like "The Psalm
of Life" or in the writings of the syndicate authors in
our newspapers.

All the literary works wherein the precious and valued
things in life are decried, wherein asceticism, death and
celibacy are vaunted, are usually unconsciously insin-
cere. The writer cannot have certain things and he
bolsters himself up by pretending he is better off with-
out them.

In examining a literary work we should always find
iiut what the author's real thoughts must be, and not
assume that they are what he claims them to be.

Eulogies of pain and the praise of the advantages of
misfortune are forced, and though the literature abound-
ing in such sentiments may aid some, it will only irri-
tate those who think.

It would be interesting to collect passages from the
works of writers who give us such ideas and inquire
what motive prompted them. It is not very difficult to
unravel the unconscious in these cases, especially if we
know something of the writer's life.

Take the following lines from "Rabbi Fen Ezra" by
Browning:

"What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me.''

UNCONSCIOUS MECHANISMS 85

No doubt these lines, put in the mouth of the Rab-
bi, were a consolation that Browning administered
to himself in his days of obscurity. It could not be
possible that he really meant it. He wanted his
work to be read and he wanted to have the name of
poet. While it is not to the credit of a poet to seek
popular applause by trying to do commonplace work,
still a poet of value is anxious to be recognised as such
by some people. He is not comforted that he does not
attain this end; on the contrary, he is disappointed.
And while it is always best to do one's utmost and to
be resigned if one fails, it does not follow that the man
should be satisfied with his mishap. The lines of Brown-
ing are a confession of regret for failure.

Then the various passages in the same poem seeking
to show the advantages of age over youth merely tell us
that after all the poet was really bemoaning his lost
youth. Love and recognition came to him late in life,
and as his youth was embroiled with some unsatisfac-
tory love affairs and as he was not recognised as a great
poet, we cannot say that Browning had an altogether
happy youth. He would have preferred to become
young again but to spend his youth more happily than
he had done. He also no doubt had unconsciously be-
fore him the praises sung by poets of youth, and recalled
Coleridge's beautiful plaint for his own departed youth,
in the poem "Youth and Age." Browning really agreed
with the sentiments of that poem, but after all what was
the use of regrets? One might as well pretend that age
was the better period of life, and one would then pos-
sibly be able to enjoy it. He wrote then, when past
fifty, to counteract his real feelings, the lines:

86 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made."

Much of Browning's optimism was forced.

The most famous example of consolation for the mis-
eries of old age is Cicero's discourse On Old Age ad-
dressed to Atticus when they were both about sixty-
three years old. Cicero puts his own arguments about
the advantages of old age into the mouth of Cato who
is eighty-four years old. Cato tries to prove beneficial
the four assumed disadvantages of old age; these are
that it takes us away from the transactions of affairs,
enfeebles our body, deprives us of most pleasures and
is not very far from death.

Cicero really tried to console himself for the loss of
his youth. Most assuredly he would rather have been
young. The objections that he finds against old age
are not satisfactorily removed by him and he does not
state them all. Even though he does show old age has
its pleasures, we read between the lines that he is aware
that his body is subject to ailments, that he is shut off
from certain pleasures, that he has not the energy or
health or zest of life he had in youth and that he dreads
death; we perceive all his arguments are got up to rid
himself of these painful thoughts. People as a rule
do not write on the disadvantages of youth; these are
taken for granted. Rich and successful men who are
old would generally be young again and give up some
of the advantages of old age. Not that many people
have not been happier in age than in youth, not that
age is not free from those violent passions to which
youth is subject, but youth still is preferable to old
age and all the arguments in favour of it will not make
a man want it to be reached more quickly.

UNCONSCIOUS MECHANISMS 87

Carlyle was the author of many statements meant to
salve his own wounds. One of his famous hobbies was
to attack people who seek happiness, no doubt because
that is the very thing he himself sought his whole life
long. He told them to seek blessedness. Let us ex-
amine the following passage from one of the most
famous chapters of Sartor Resartus, entitled "The Ever-
lasting Yea."

"I asked myself: What is this that, ever since earli-
est years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and la-
menting and self-torturing, on account of? Say it in
a word; is it not because thou art not happy? ....
Foolish soul! What act of legislature was there that
thou shouldst be happy? . . . Close thy BjTon; open
thy Goethe. . . . there is in man a Higher than love
of Happiness: he can do without happiness, and in-
stead thereof find Blessedness."

We can discern under all this Carlyle's despair be-
cause he is not happy. Teufelsdrock, who is Carlyle's
picture of himself, had a sweetheart who was stolen by
a friend. One may be sure that Teufelsdrock would
have given up his ideal of blessedness if this misfor-
tune could have been prevented. No doubt, like Car-
lyle, he had dyspepsia, was poverty-stricken and had
a hard path to travel to success. Of course he would
have wished to have had a good stomach, to be free
from money troubles, and to be recognised. All these
fortunate circumstances were not his. He had to say
to himself, "Away with them. I am better off without
them." But it is certain he never could have really
felt this way. We learn from Carlyle's recently pub-
lished letters, written to his future wife in his court-
ing days, that he was unhappy for personal reasons; be-
cause she coquetted with him or jilted him, because he

88 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

was unsuccessful, because he was poor, etc. He whined
only too much though no doubt he had reason therefor.
He is full of the Byronism which he affected to despise.

It is likely that Browning and Carlyle, who remain,
nevertheless, among the greatest English writers, may
have thought at the time of writing that they believed
what they said. But psychoanalysis teadies us that we
do not really know our own minds. We may think
we are honest when we really are deceiving ourselves.

A writer may seek an effect which is attained by laud-
ing a moral sentiment. Did not Shelley profess to be-
lieve in immortality of the soul, in his elegy on Keats,
Adonais, while we know from a prose essay of his that he
did not believe in immortality?

We should try to learn the whole truth from the frac-
tional part of it or unconscious lie that authors give us.
We will find a personal background for all their the-
ories, a past humiliation or a present need, which will
explain the origin of the ideas professed.

When we read in his Autobiography that Spencer
ascribes his nervous breakdown to hard work, if we are
Freudians we figure that Spencer has not told us
the truth. We know that most cases of breakdown
have had a previous history, usually in some love or
sex repression. We are aware that Spencer was a bach-
elor who never had his craving for love satisfied, and
probably led a celibate life. This led to his nervous
troubles. This is merely one instance where by the aid
of psychoanalysis we can read more than the author
reveals.

There are many instances where critics who had never
heard of psychoanalysis still applied its principles. In
his essay on Thoreau, Stevenson dilates on Thoreau's
cynical views on friendship. When Stevenson inserted

UNCONSCIOUS MECHANISMS 89

the essay in his Familiar Portraits he wrote a little in-
troductory note, in which he shows he penetrated the
secret of Thoreau's views. Thoreau was simply seeking
to find a salve for his own lack of social graces. His
strange views and personality made him almost an im-
possible friend.

n

Even a great writer like Goethe deceived himself, as one
can see by a famous passage in his autobiography as to
why Spinoza appealed to him. In the fourteenth book he
says that his whole mind was filled with the statement
from the Ethics, that he who loves God does not desire
God to love him in return. Goethe desired to be dis-
interested in love and friendship, and he says that his
subsequent daring question, "If I love thee, what is
that to thee?" was spoken straight from his heart.

Great as Goethe's intellect was, he could not perceive
that his partiality for this passage from Spinoza was due
to the consolation he found in it for unreciprocated love.
This particular sentiment from the profound work of
that philosopher is really one of the least valuable parts
of the work. It was probably inspired unconsciously
by the philosopher's rejection at the hands of Miss Van
den Ende, whom he meant to marry. The Ethics was
finished when the author was about thirty-three. Spi-
noza, who led the life of a celibate, sublimated his re-
pressed love into philosophic speculation. When he
wrote the passage in question he was consoling himself
for loving a girl who did not care for him. The mech-
anism was: "I am not such a fool after all, because I
love a girl who does not love me; why should I even
want her to do so; don't we love God, and yet don't
want Him to love us in return?" Goethe, having gone

90 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

through the harassing experience that led to the writing
of Werther, repeated the mental processes that Spinoza
must have gone through in creating the sentiment about
our not desiring God to love us in return.

Goethe imagined that love could be disinterested, and
this is really not so. The lover seeks a return of his
love, for that is just what love means. Those novels
where sacrificing lovers turn over the women they love
to rivals, as in George Sand's Jacques and Dostoievsky's
Injured and Insulted, do not show disinterested love,
but merely obedience to an abstract idea with which the
whole individual's psychic and physical constitution is
not in harmony at all. Goethe tried to be different from
what he really was. The question, "What is that to
thee if I love thee?" with its corollciry that the love
need not be returned, did not come, as Goethe thought,
straight from his heart. His interest in Spinoza's senti-
ment, just as the creation of it by Spinoza, was a self
curative process for grief because of disprised love. All
psychoneuroses are unsuccessful efforts to purge one's
self of repressed feelings.

Now let us investigate the sentiment itself, and we
will see under analysis it has no value intellectually.

As a matter of fact, there is no warrant for Spinoza's
assumption that man does not desire that God love him
in return. All religion is based on the principle that
God loves us and cares for us more than he does for
other animals, or more than he does for other tribes or
religious sects. Prayers are made to God to make us
happy and prosper and satisfy our wants. This is tanta-
mount to saying we want His love. If God, or Nature,
as Spinoza understood Him, was only a malevolent force
and gave us tindiluted pain, we would not love Him or
her. Again, man does not love God or Nature in the

UNCONSCIOUS MECHANISMS 91

sense that he loves a woman, so even if Spinoza were
right that man does not desire to be loved by God or
Nature in turn, it is because that love does not promise
the pleasure derived from the returned love of the
woman.

The truth is that both Spinoza and Goethe would
have preferred to have had their love returned, and
had such been the case, they would not have occupied
themselves with this fatuous idea.

in

\y Then there is the reaction-impulse and the infantile
regression in writers. Many books are written by their
authors to counteract certain impulses. They feel that
their course of conduct or thought was reprehensible,
and they try to make amends for this. They become
fanatical converts; they show a regression to a fixed
period in their own lives, and return to the religion of
their parents. Writers who in spite of being unable to
believe in religious dogmas, miracles, ascetic notions of
morality, nevertheless return in later life to the religions
advocating these, belong to this class. The leading of a
wicked life, but more often the influence of childish
memories of a religious household, are responsible for
such conversions. The converts feel young again; pleas-
ant recollections of the mother or father and delicious
memories of school days play a part in the process.
Many free thinkers who have had a theological training
never really outgrow this.

Tolstoi's conversion was due to the wild days he
spent as a young man. He was a proud aristocrat, and
gave play to all his instincts; he was an atheist and
pessimist, he was a gambler and a rake. He shows us

92 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

his evolution in his various novels and autobiograph-
ical works. He finally came to deify ignorant peasants
and advocated extreme non-resistance. He worshipped
poverty, practised self-abnegation, and derogated sex.
But, after all, his latter views are but the reactions to
the life he led in youth, and a regression with some
changes to views he was taught in childhood.

The same is true of Strindberg, who as a young man
was an atheist, and a believer in free love; through the
sufferings brought about by his three marriages and his
attacks of insanity, he "turned." He looked with dis-
approval upon his early ideas, attributed much of his
misery to his entertaining them; hence he discarded
them, and returned to the religious views he held as a
child. But his greatest work belonged to the period
when he held liberal ideas.

Dostoievsky was really always a devout orthodox
Christian, even in his early revolutionary days. His
great suffering in Siberia chastened him, £md made him
find a welcome religion in the religion of suffering, a
guide in Christ who suffered. He is always at pains in
his later novels to prove the existence of a personal
God — a fact which makes one suspect that he had his
own doubts, and that he tried to rid himself of them
by his writing. Being also an epileptic, he would, partic-
ularly in these attacks, digress to infantile fixations and
they would lead him to worship his sublimated "Father
in Heaven."

There are many who naively insist that these men,
when they went back to the belief of childhood days,
had at last come to see the truth. The point of view
taken is dependent on whether a man considers belief
in the dogma of a religion a fetter or an asset.

In English literature we have as examples of reac-

UNCONSCIOUS MECHANISMS 93

tions, both in religion and politics, the Lake School poets,
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. All of them later
turned away from the republican and pantheistic ideas
of their youth. The reason Southey fought so bitterly
against free thinkers like Byron and Shelley, is that iri
youth he, like them, also was attached to the ideas of
the French Revolution. He became a Tory of Tories,
showed disapproval of all the leading thinkers of the
time, of men like Hazlitt, Lamb and Hunt. Liberal
ideas, it is well known, have no greater enemy than a
renegade liberal. Southey was sufficiently pilloried by
Byron in the Vision of Last Jtddgment, and the psychol-
ogy of his reaction has been drawn in the portrait of
him by Hazlitt in The Spirit of the Age, while the gen-
tle Lamb has administered to him a rebuke in the im-
mortal Letter of Elia to Robert Southey.

When one reads the theological works of the gifted
Coleridge, such as The Aids to Reflection and some of
the Table Talk, and ponders on the spectacle of this
former Spinozist and Unitarian, speaking in defence of
dogmas that have not one logical argument in their
favour, one is amazed. Poor Coleridge! What a wreck-
age of the human intellect is often made by private
misfortunes. Here was the greatest literary critic and
one of the subtlest poets England ever had, talking
about supernatural miracles as though they were not
even to be questioned. "The image of my father, my
reverend, kind, learned, simple-hearted father, is a re-
ligion to me," he once said, thus giving us the key to
his reaction. The elder Coleridge was a vicar, and died
when the poet was nine years old. The poet became
religious because of his repressed childish affection for
a religious father who influenced him.

As for Wordsworth, he was sufficiently punished for

94 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

his reaction, in that in later life he was never able to
do creditable literary work. And Shelley's poem, "To
Wordsworth," and the lines of Browning beginning,
"Just for a handful of silver he left us," generally
thought to refer to Wordsworth, were deserved rebukes.

The reaction impulse plays a great role in shaping
the destinies of literary men. It sometimes sweeps an
entire age and gathers all before it. This happened
in France in that period of French Literature which
Brandes called the Catholic Reaction, when Chateau-
briand, De Maistre, Bonald, and others were influential.
It again occurred in the same country in the early nine-
ties when leading free thinkers like Bourget and Huys-
mans went from the extreme radical position to Catholi-
cism. Only great writers like Zola and Anatole France
were able to keep their heads clear. Now most of these
converts really were always at heart religious. They
never emerged from the associations of their religion even
though their intellects would not enable them to believe
some of its dogmas. Unconsciously Bourget and Huys-
man were always Catholics in feeling.

Hawthorne wrote a story in which he imagines some
of the dead English poets of the early decades of the
nineteenth century continuing to live, and living a life
in complete reaction to their youthful lives. He pic-
tures the atheist Shelley as becoming a Christian, a pre-
diction that might have come true; for had Shelley died
at seventy instead of thirty, he might have changed, as
there was some similarity between his ideas of "per-
fectibility" and those of Christianity. This is, how-
ever, a mere surmise, as one of the last letters he wrote
contains an attack on Christianity.

There are numerous instances of the reactionary im-
pulse in literature. Shakespeare, who was of plebeian

UNCONSCIOUS MECHANISMS 95

origin, often attacked the common people in his plays.
He wrote favourably of nobility, and had little sympathy
with democracy. Nietzsche, who was gentle personally
and suffered much pain in his life, wrote in defence of
cruelty, wished to do away with pity, sought to kill the
finer emotions, and thought invalids should be left to
die instead of being allowed to be cured. He was cre-
ating a system in philosophy whose ruling ideas were
the very opposite to those which governed his private
life. He could not even witness another's pain. Pro-
fessor Eucken tells a story illustrating Nietzsche's gen-
tleness. When that philosopher of the superman orally
examined a student who did not answer correctly, Nietz-
sche would prompt him and answer the question for
him, as he was unable to witness the student's discom-
fiture. Bums gave us some poetic outbursts against the
crime of seduction, probably because he himself was
guilty of it. Thackeray, who was hopelessly in love with
a married woman, Mrs. Brookfield, and was rejected by
her, affected to be very cynical at disappointed lovers and
ridiculed them in his Pendennis. Cicero, who loved glory,
wrote against it.
^ So men are often the very opposite of what they ap-
pear in their books, but this is done also unconsciously,
although sometimes the effort may be deliberate. Con-
verts are fanatics. Reformed drunkards are the most
convinced prohibitionists. The severest moralists and
Puritans are often former rakes. The man who rails
most bitterly against a vice may often be suspected of
struggling against temptation with it.

Similarly, the fact that professors in exact sciences
and devotees to a philosophy of materialism, often be-
come the most ardent exponents of spiritualism, may be
due to an unconscious reaction on their part. No doubt

96 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the desire to believe that the dead can still communi-
cate with us is the real basis of this belief. It seems
that scientists like Lodge, Crookes, Barrett, Wallace
and Lombroso, who have done so much to spread spir-
itualism, should be the last persons to embrace absurd
beliefs so at variance with the principles which these
men profess in their scientific work.

CHAPTER VII

PROJECTION, VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM AS

WORK OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

I

Renan drew himself in his Lije of Jesus, as one may
see by comparing it wiHi his Memoirs of My Youth.
He projected himself upon Jesus and wrote a life of
Renan instead. He portrayed in the volume his in-
dividual traits and gave his own characteristics to Jesus.
His picture of Jesus is not a true one. Unconsciously
he read into Jesus's life predominating features of his
own personality, and also of his sister Henrietta's. He
emphasised Christ's love of flowers, his indifference to
the external world, his obsession with a Utopian ideal
and a mission in life. He found in Jesus a love for the
simple and common folk, and a partiality towards
women and children. He admired Jesus's exaltation of
beggars and sympathised with his making poverty an
object of love and desire. He saw no external affecta-
tion in Christ, who was bound only to his mission, and
who was a revolutionist besides. Jesus had only some of
the qualities Renan attributed to him.

"Never did any one more loftily avow that disdain
of the 'world' which is the essential thing of great things
and great originality," said Renan of his Master. Thus
was he describing himself unconsciously and presenting
the plan of life which he, Renan, had followed.

97

98 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

If we read the analysis of Jesus's character and teach-
ings in the last three chapters of the Life of Jesus and
then turn to Renan's analysis of his own character in
his autobiography, we shall see that the author had pro-
jected himself upon Jesus, as it were, and identified him-
self with the Master he worshipped. He finds in him-
self, he tells us in his autobiography, love of poverty,
indifference to the world, devotion to his mission, af-
fection for the common people, esteem for simplicity,
contempt for success and luxury, fondness for poverty,
dislike for the world of action, such as mercantile life —
in short, he dwells on all the meek and lowly traits that
he has, and arrogates to himself Jesus's practices, and
attributes to his master idiosyncrasies of his own. In an
unguarded moment he forgets his customary modesty
and gives us the clue to himself in these words: "I am
the only man of my time who has understood the char-
acter of Jesus and of Francis of Assissi." In this bit
of self-portraiture is the whole secret of his Life of
Jems. Critics were attacking him for drawing a false
picture of the founder of Christianity, but it did not
dawn on them why the portrait was distorted. "Jesus
has in reality ever been my master," says Renan.

How strongly Renan identified himself with and pro-
jected himself upon Jesus may be seen from the fact
that the memoirs written at the age of sixty are in the
same tone as the Life of Jesus, published twenty years
earlier. He also tells us in the memoirs how the Life of
Jesus originated. From the moment he abandoned the
church, he says, with the resolution that he should still
remain faithful to Jesus, the Life of Jesus was mentally
written.

A few more traits that may be mentioned, which he
felt he had in common with Jesus, were his aversion to

VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM 99

incurring intimate friendships. There is reason to be-
lieve that Jesus did have friends, but Renan, who did
not cultivate friendship (though he had a good friend
in Berthelot), tried to persuade himself that Jesus was
also like him in this regard. Again Renan deemed him-
self a dreamer, like Jesus, who was, however, also a man
of action. Renan also saw his own effeminacy and
kindliness in Jesus, who, however, vented himself of
vigorous utterances.

Renan also fancied he found in Jesus his own inher-
ent hostility to Jewish culture; his own anti-Semitism.
As a matter of fact, Jesus owed much to Jewish culture,
though he wanted the Jews to abandon some of their cus-
toms and to revise the Mosaic laws; the feeling among
Jews was that Jesus, instead of being anti-Semitic,
wished to be their leader and Messiah and King. Renan
reads into Jesus his own anti-Semitism. Those who are
familiar with Renan's writings are aware of the many
slurring and contemptuous references he makes to the
Jews. In fact, one of the paradoxes of his life is that
with his liberality and gentleness, with his abandoning of
all Christian dogma, he entertains a bitter feeling to-
wards the people who gave him his ideal man, the people
who originated, even by his own admission, many of
Jesus's maxims. Renan states that Jesus profited im-
mensely by the teachings of Jesus, son of Sirach, of
Rabbi Hillel and of the synagogue. Renan unjustly
made Jesus have his own failing, anti-Semitism.

Strangely enough, Renan's treatment of the story of
Jesus (outside of his giving Jesus traits of his own) has
been very largely a Jewish one. It is for this reason
that all devout Christians were offended. Renan treated
Jesus as a man and refused to credit all the legends con-
nected with him. Renan did not believe that Jesus was

100 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

bom without a human father; that he was a member of
a Trinity; that he could perform supernatural miracles.
In short, Renan did not accept Jesus as a son of God,
though giving him traits almost divine and free from
human frailties. The picture of Jesus in the life is an
idealised Jewish portrayal.

Renan serves as one of the best examples of a free
thinker remaining a devotee of his faith, though discard-
ing all the tenets on which it rests. His early religious
training had a permanent influence on him, and he was
a Christian all his life, even though he differed with
the church. In one of his last and most profound es-
says, the "Examination of the Human Conscience," he
gives us a confession of his faith. Here he appears as a
pantheist, but ventures incredible guesses that there
may be a supernatural. His church mind plays havoc
with his Spinozism, and we see his early infantile in-
fluences. Intellpctually at times he stands high, higher
it may be said without irreverence than his master
Jesus, since he had at his command a knowledge of
science and philosophy with which Jesus was unfamiliar.
The greatness of Renan appears in his Philosophical
Dialogues, in his Philosophical Dramas, in his Future of
Science, in the Anti-Christ and other essays and books.
When he moralises he is a monk; when he speculates on
philosophic and scientific subjects, he is a thinker.
George Brandes's Renan as a dramatist is an excellent
study.*

Yet literature scarcely offers such an instance of a
man projecting himself upon a historical character. Such
a projection is similar to the seeking, in an unusual de-
gree, by nervous people of moral shelter and consola-
tion in some other person. The reposing of Renan on

* International Quarterly.

VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM loi

Jesus gives us an insight into the birth of worship of
religious founders. Pfister, a disciple of Freud, and
himself a Christian pastor, says: "In the divine father-
love, he, whose longing for help, for ethical salvation, is
not satisfied by the surrounding reality, finds an asylum.
In the love for the Saviour, the love-thirsting soul which
finds no comprehension and no return love in his fel-
lowmen is refreshed."

A complete psychoanalytic study of Renan, which
this essay does not pretend to be, would make a fuller
inquiry into his relations with his mother, his affection
for his sister and her influence on him and his never-
swerving admiration for the priests who were his early
teachers. He has left tributes to all of them. They
ruled his life. In his unconscious a fixation upon them
was buried. His love for them kept him a Chris-
tian, when intellectually he was a free thinker. They
are present in his Life aj Christ, and the psychoan-
alyst can see them guiding the pen of Renan. They are
always with him. Had they not loved him and he them
so intensely, had he not inherited so strongly those
meek, effeminate and kindly traits, his temperament
might have been as unchristian as his intellect.

We see why the extreme liberal and the orthodox
Christian were offended by his Lije of Christ, and why
hundreds of pamphlets and articles were written against
it. It was really a portrait of the author, and the un-
conscious Christian in him puzzled the radicals, while
his conscious intellect seemed like blasphemy to the
devout followers of dogmas. He gave his own idealised
traits to his hero, and the freethinkers complained Renan
made Jesus a god anyhow, while it seemed an insult to
the Christians that mere moral virtues instead of divin-

102 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

ity should be thrust upon Jesus, who they felt did not
need Renan's compliments.

n

\/ Authors also draw on the unconscious for their immoral
characters. In Pere Goriat Balzac drew himself in Eugene
Rastignac, but the author is also present in the villain of
the novel, Vautrin or Jacques Collins, who appears like-
wise in Last Illusions and The Splendors and Miseries of
Cowtesans. Vautrin, it will be recalled, tries to persuade
Eugene to marry a girl whose father will leave her a mil-
lion francs, if Eugene consents to have her brother, the
more likely heir, despatched by a crony of Vautrin's.
Thus Eugene would be enabled to become rich immediate-
ly instead of being compelled to struggle for years. Vau-
trin wants a reward for his services. Vautrin's words
are really the voice of Balzac's unconscious; Eugene's
inner struggles are Balzac's own; and though the young
student rejects the proposition he takes up Vautrin's
line of reasoning unconsciously, even though to drop it.
Vautrin's Machiavellian viewpoint was at times uncon-
sciously entertained by Balzac himself, though never
practised. We know Balzac always sought for schemes
of getting rich to pay his debts, and was always occu-
pied with thoughts of his aggrandisement and ambition.
He no doubt unconsciously entertained notions that
riches, love, fame might be attained by violating the
moral edicts of society; these ideas may have obtruded
but a few seconds to be immediately dismissed. But
once they made their appearance they were repressed
in Balzac's unconscious, and emerged in the characters
of Vautrin and other villains who are the author's un-
conscious.

VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM 103

Balzac understood that vice often triumphed and that
the way of virtue was often hard. "Do you believe
that there is any absolute standard in this world? De-
spise mankind and find out the meshes that you can slip
through in the net of the code." Vautrin here gives
Balzac's inner unconscious secret away. The author
was not aware that he drew upon himself unconsciously
in depicting Vautrin. This, of course, does not mean
that Balzac agreed with Vautrin. We remember Eugene
shouted out to Vautrin, "Silence, sir! I will not hear
any more; you make me doubt myself." The author
merely got his unconscious into one of his leading vil-
lains, just as Milton did in Satan, as Goethe did in
Mephistopheles.

Vautrin is Lucien de Rubempre's evil influence also,
and Balzac saw how disastrously he himself might have
ended his life had he heeded his unconscious, his Jacques
Collin.

,■ Since literature is often depicting struggles and con-
flicts with our evil instincts, it deals directly with the
material of the unconscious; for the unconscious that
psychoanalysis is concerned with is that which springs
from repressions forced upon us by society as well as
by fate. In literature the unconscious appears under
various symbols and disguises, just as it does in dreams.
The devil, for example, is but our unconscious, symbol-
ised. He represents our hidden primitive desires
struggling to emerge; he is the eruption of our forbidden
desires. His deeds are the accomplished wishes of our
own unconscious. We are interested in the devil be-
cause he is ourselves in our dreams and unguarded mo-
ments.

The fascination that the villain has for us is because
our unconscious recognises in him a long-forgotten

104 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

brother. True, our moral sense soon prevails, and we
rejoice when the rascal is worsted, but he represents
the author's unconscious as well as our own. Any one
who has read of the thoughts and conduct of Raskolni-
koff in Crime and Punishment, or of Julian Sorel in Red
and Black, or of George Aurispa in The Triumph of
Death, will see that much of the authors themselves, or
rather their unconscious selves, is drawn in these crimi-
nals. Dostoievsky, Stendhal and D'Annunzio all said
to themselves in writing: "I too might have ended like
these characters. I did think their thoughts and a slight
circumstance could have led me to the crimes they com-
mitted."

, The man who hates a vice most intensely is often
'^ just the man who has something of it in his own nature,
against which he is fighting. The author sometimes pun-
ishes himself in his novel by making the character suffer
for engaging in the course of life that the author him-
self followed. There is always a suspicion, when a
writer raves most furiously against a crime or act, that
he has committed that deed in his unconscious.

in

The reason La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims,
V/ is called a cynic is because he reveals the unconscious,
at the bottom of which is self-love. He knows that there
is great egotism, nay something akin to depravity, at the
root of our emotions. He shows us much in our psychic
life that many of us never suspected was there. When
he brings it forth we grow indignant and yet say to our-
selves, "How true I"

Let us examine a few of these maxims at random and
note the insight into the unconscious that the author

VILLAIN PORTRAYALS AND CYNICISM 105

displays. He understood that repression was at the basis
of our unconscious. Take the following sentence: "Wit
sometimes enables us to act rudely with impunity."
This saying anticipates Freud's analysis of wit in his
Wit and the Unconscicms. The Frenchman digs up
in a sentence the hidden strata of the unconscious. La
Rochefoucauld recognised that we must curb our primi-
tive instincts, repress our private wishes, and leave our
innermost thoughts unexpressed in order to adapt our-
selves to people. The world moves by concealing for
charity's, and often decency's, sake its unconscious.
"Men would not live long in society," says the Maxims,
"were they not the dupes of each other."

He knew that our primitive instincts could be sub- ^
dued only when they were not too strong, and that vir-
tue was practised when it was not difficult to do so.
"When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with the
idea we have left them." "If we conquer our passions
it is more from their weakness than from our strength."
"Perseverance is not deserving of blame or praise, as it
is merely the continuance of tastes and feelings which
we can neither create nor destroy."

He understood the great part played by vanity in the /
unconscious. The most modest of us are, in our uncon-
scious, vain. "When not prompted by praise we say
little." "Usually we are more satirical from vanity than
malice." "The refusal of praise is only the wish to be
praised twice."

La Rochefoucauld was aware of the unconscious ^
"immoral" instincts in virtuous women. Though we may
dislike him for some of his remarks, he, however, gave
utterance to a truth when he asserted that women do
not want their love or sex feelings repressed any more
than men do. "There are few virtuous women who are

io6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

not tired of their part." "Virtue in woman is often
love of reputation and repose." Freud went a step
further and showed that women usually have neurosis
from repressed sex.

The Frenchman also understood the role played by the
unconscious in friendship, and that is the reason he made
his well-known statement, "In the adversity of our best
friends we always find something which is not wholly
displeasing to us." He might have been less brutal had
he stated his meaning directly in words to the follow-
ing effect: When we strive for the same goal as our
friend and he reaches it and we do not, his success
hurts our vanity and we would almost prefer that he
too had failed. We are pleased by his success only if
we would profit thereby.

La Rochefoucauld's statement, "It is well that we
know not all our wishes," will be appreciated by students
of psychoanalysis.

To conclude, La Rochefoucauld always read between
the lines in deeds he saw. He fathomed the hidden
motives of our conduct. Note the great powers of ob-
servation he displayed in the following: "Too great a
hurry to discharge an obligation is an ingratitude."
"The gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of re-
ceiving greater benefits."
\/ He recognised that life is often possible only by a
process of self-deception, but that too much of such de-
ception is responsible for individual and social evils.
There are times when the truth about our imconscious
must be told, no matter how painful.

CHAPTER VIII

GENroS AS A PRODUCT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

In studying the psychology of authorship by means of
psychoanalysis we learn something about the unconsci-
ous growth of an author's book; this phase of its process
has not been universally admitted. We are often told
certain incidents gave rise to the writing of a volume, but
they were only the precipitating factors. The book had
shaped itself unconsciously in the author's mind long be-
fore; it only gets itself projected in an endurable form.
So though Stevenson tells us that the shape of a map of
an island took his fancy and gave birth to Treasure
Island, we know as a matter of fact that he had, as a
boy, for many years been leading mentally the life of the
treasure hunters. Stevenson himself relates how the
brown faces of his characters peeped out upon him from
unexpected quarters. The map just set him in action.

Let me sum up briefly the growth of a literary per-
formance from a psychoanalytical standpoint. Let us
assume that the author at some time of his life was
placed amidst circumstances the reality of which jarred
on him, offended his sense of beauty, wrecked his happi-
ness and frustrated his most cherished desires. Deprived
of a world that he wished to inhabit, he built one in
his fantasies and day dreams, one that was the very

107

io8 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

opposite of that in which he was constrained to dwell.
If he was toiling in barren labour he pictured himself at
congenial work, or leisure; if he dwelt in squalor and was
deprived of necessities, he mentally placed himself in
beautiful surroundings, rolling in luxury, and in posses-
sion of property he prized most. If he had no one to
love he formed an ideal for himself, with whom he lived.
If the loved one did not return his love he depicted him-
self as wed to her.

That literature is influenced and created by the wishes
of the character or author may be seen readily. A tale
of Ernest Renan sheds light on this theory, and also
serves as a valuable illustration how neurotics and insane
people derive their illnesses from unfulfilled love desires,
and how they build phantasies where those wants are
satisfied. Pleasant pictures appear in day dreams, but
these often assume such reality that the victim cannot
tell the fanciful from the actual. In the first sketch in
his autobiography, called The Flax Crusher, Renan relates
a pathetic story of a daughter of a flax crusher who lost
her mind because her love for a priest was unreturned.
She unconsciously carried out her wishes in her actions
and thoughts. She would take a log of wood and dress
it up in rags and rock and kiss the artificial infant and
put it in the cradle at night. She imagined that this
was her child by the priest. Thus she stilled the maternal
urge. She fancied that she was keeping house for him.
She would hem and mark linen, often interlacing his and
her own initials. She finally was led to commit theft
from his home. This story was taken from real life.
The artist who is frustrated in love acts as this girl; he
imagines that his love is being fulfilled and that he is
living with the loved one.

A classic example of fantasy building is Charles

GENIUS AS PRODUCT OF UNCONSCIOUS 109

Lamb's Dream Children. Rejected by the sweetheart of
his youth, Ann Simmons, he pictured himself married
to her and surrounded by their children and talking to
them and entertaining them. He projected a world as
it might have been, and as he desired it for himself; he
wakes up from his day dream — the children were merely
those of his imagination.

Day dreams then are the beginning of literary creation.
In them we create a world for ourselves, and we make
actual people fit into that world. After such continual
living in a fictitious realm a writer seeks to express
himself, and if he is an artist, to give it endurable
form. If the dreamer dwells too long in one imaginative
abode he may lose the faculty of distinguishing the real
from the ideal. He may become subject to hallucinations
and become utterly unbalanced as did Renan's flax
crusher's daughter.

The literary man generally saves himself from neurosis
by putting his dream into artistic shape; though writing
of their deams and troubles has not prevented artists
from going mad, nor continuing to brood over the
troubles that had already inspired their works. But
the point of difference is clearly established between the
neurotic and the artist. One dreams on till he is res-
cued from going mad by a physician's help, if possible;
the other partly cures himself by self-expression, and at
the same time gives the world a piece of art or literature,
which consoles many, because they too have either had
or witnessed similar troubles, or consider themselves
possible victims to such sorrows.

Very few English writers understood the mechanism
of day dreams better than Dr. Johnson, as the chapter
in Rasselas on "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imap-
nation" shows.

no THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

One of the best illustrations of the psychoanalytic
theory of authorship detailed by the writer himself oc-
curs in a once-famous English novel, Kingsley's Alton
Locke, published in 1850. Alton Locke tells us how he
came to write poetry. The chapter entitled "First Love"
recounts the process, and we learn how because he led
a life of drudgery, he created a far more pleasant one in
his imagination and then unconsciously sought to make
a record of this life.

n

Psychoanalysis is always interested in learning ex-
actly how literary masterpieces are born. Just as
it seeks to know through dreams what are some of the
hidden secrets in the unconscious, so it tries tj discover
what unconscious life made the writer project his vision.

Two of the most famous love stories of the eighteenth
century which had a personal background, and whose
evolution have been told by the authors, themselves,
were Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise (1760), and Goethe's
Sorrows of Werther (1774). They were the predecessors
of the entire field of autobiographical love-lorn lugubri-
ous literature that pervaded Europe in the early decades
of the nineteenth century. George Brandes has shown
how Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, Senancour,
Byron, George Sand and others owed much of their
methods of recording their love troubles to these two
novels. We to-day scarcely realise the great vogue that
these tales at one time had.

The authors have given us accounts of the birth of
these novels. Both of these geniuses had been frus-
trated in their loves; as a result they created mental
fantasies and lived in a more pleasant world of their
own creation, and finally, bursting with desire for ex-

GENIUS AS PRODUCT OF UNCONSCIOUS iii

pression, produced their novels. The unconscious life
buried in them came forth and was crystallised in art.
Rousseau's Confessions and Goethe's autobiography,
Poetry and Truth, tell us how the novels came to light.

In the ninth book of the Confessions, Rousseau in-
forms us that when he reached the age of forty-five, he
realised that he had really never enjoyed true love. As
a result he began living in a fantastic world where his
craving was satisfied. He realised his wishes in his day
dreams. "The impossibility of attaining real beings,"
he says, "threw me into the regions of chimera, and see-
ing nothing in existence worthy of my delirium, I sought
food for it in the ideal world, which my imagination
quickly peopled with beings after my own heart." He
tells us how he valued love and friendship, and that he
created two female friends according to his taste, that he
gave one of them a lover, who was also the platonic
friend of the other lady; that in this friend and lover
he drew his own portrait. He imagined that there were
to be no rivalries or pain. These fictions, he continues,
gained in consistence. He then had an inclination to
put on paper this situation of fancy. "Recollecting
everything I had felt during my youth, this, in some
measure, gave me an object to that desire of loving
which I had never been able to satisfy, and by which I
felt myself consumed." Here we have the secret. He
sought in art what he had not in reality. At first he
wrote incoherent letters, just as his feelings prompted
him, and he thus completed the two first parts of the
novel (which is in the form of letters) without a con-
scious effort to make a connected work.

At this time Rousseau, who was a married man, fell
in love with the wife of D'Holbach, Sophia D'Houdetot.
He loved her madly. He says, "It was not until after

112 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

her departure that, wishing to think of Julia (his hero-
ine) , I was struck with surprise at being unable to think
of anything but Madame D'Holbach." He now identi-
fied the real with the ideal; he found the woman of his
dreams. But now his troubles began. Union with his be-
loved Countess was impossible. New emotions rose with-
in him, as material for his novel. The work really wrote
itself. He originally formed an ideal because he was
not loved by any one who fulfilled that conception.
When he discovered such a person and she was beyond
his attainment, he imagined himself as her lover. All
the misery he recorded had its counterpart in his personal
experience. Without the unconscious reveries which he
indulged in as a result of his needs and tribulations,
the novel would not have been written.

After the story was published, women worshipped the
author. It was recognised that he was the hero of the
book, and it was generally believed that the charac-
ters were not fictitious. The novel gives us an account'
of the real Rousseau at least as fully as the Confessions
themselves, where facts are not always truthfully re-
ported.

Goethe has recorded just as minutely the origin of his
Sorrows of Werther. He traces the book back to his
love for Charlotte Buff, the betrothed of a friend of his.
He resolved to give free play to the idiosyncrasies of
his inner nature. He describes how he had day dreams
and how he held mental dialogues with different people.
He then was led to record these fancies on paper. The
substances of his novel "were first talked over with
several individuals in such imaginary dialogues, and
only later in the process of composition itself were made
to appear as if directed to one single friend and sympa-
thiser." He became weary of life, and had suicidal

GENIUS AS PRODUCT OF UNCONSCIOUS 113

thoughts. He then heard of the suicide of his friend
Jerusalem, who had been in love with a married woman.
Goethe saw that he was really in the same position as his
friend; his loved one belonged to another. "On the in-
stant," Goethe goes on, "the plan of Werther was formed,
and the whole drew together, and became a solid mass. I
was naturally led to breathe into the work I had in hand
all the warmth which makes no distinction between the
imaginary and the actual." He wrote the book in four
weeks. "I had written the little volume, almost uncon-
sciously like a somnambulist." As a result he freed him-
self from his suffering. The artist stepped in and cured
the man. Goethe illustrates the theory that artistic
creation acts as a self-cure of a developing neurosis.
"By this composition," Goethe wrote, "more than by
any other, I had freed myself from that stormy element
in which ... I had been so violently tossed to and
fro. I felt as if I had made a general confession and was
once more free and happy, and justified in beginning a
new life."

The public thought that the book was solely the his-
tory of young Jerusalem's tragic love affair, and« did not
altogether understand that the cry was G6ethe's own.
His mental dialogues and the longings of his inner spirit
found expression in this novel. His sufferings were un-
decipherable by the public, he tells us, because he worked
in obscurity. He also gave the attributes of several
women to Lotte, and hence several ladies claimed to have
been the original models.

Thus we see how two great love stories were created
almost unconsciously by the authors. Day dreams and
actual love; the longing for reality, for lack of which
imaginary situations were created; and the putting down
in the form of letters and dialogues the ideas and emo-

114 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

tions that burst forth, all led to the shaping of the liter-
ary product.

in

Psychoanalysis sheds some light on the nature of
genius, and especially literary genius. But it does not
define it within hard and fast lines.

Literary works are largely the result of repressions
that the author has suffered; he has been led as the re-
sult of them to cry out his sorrow or to depict ideal sit-
uations where such grief as his does not exist. He must
write so that people who have had similar repressions,
or who can imagine them, will find a personal appeal in
the works they read. But the situations described must
also, besides evoking an emotional appeal, stir the
teaders intellectually, so that they sympathise where the
writer counted on sympathy. When the author writes
only of his joys, the unconscious is also at work.

The writer also must be a master of his art, so that
fundamental rules of composition and outrages on com-
mon sense he does not violate.

Especially when the author has discovered new fea-
tures of his unconscious life, or has been led to present
original and profound ideas as a result of such discover-
ies; particularly when he moves the reader with
intensity and evokes a passionate response, does the
writer begin to merit the name of genius. When we say
that a genius is a man who discovers a new truth or
depicts beauty, we really mean that he is a man who,
having experienced a repression, has been led to make
certain conclusions from that event, that society has
not wished to admit; he is a great artist when he gives
an effective description of that repression; he is a great
thinker when he sees certain ways by which that repres-

GENIUS AS PRODUCT OF UNCONSCIOUS 115

sion may be avoided, and he is a humanitarian when he
informs the world how to attain a form of happiness
that had been denied him.

We thus do away with the very pernicious doctrine
that genius is a form of degeneracy or insanity. Geniuses
are often sufferers from neurosis, or describe characters
suffering from them; they are not degenerates, as Lom-
broso and Nordau would have us believe. A neurotic
person and a degenerate one are not necessarily the same.
The term "degenerate" is not the proper name for men
like Ibsen or Tolstoi, no matter how repugnant their ideas
might be to people. Nor does it follow that because
some poets like Villon, Verlaine and Wilde had spent
time in jail for crimes, their poems are to be stamped
as degenerate products. While it is apparent that some
of the author's insanity appears in works by Swift,
Rousseau, Maupassant, Nietzsche and Strindberg, their
masterpieces are noble works of art.

The faculty of literary genius is not possessed by a
few; many people possess some of its qualities. Intelli-
gent or sincere lovers have often written love letters that
never got into print which were stamped with the quali-
ties of genius. Highly gifted people in private life often
utter thoughts which if collected and published would
constitute works that show genius. There have been
many people who have uttered sentiments as wise as
those found in Boswell's Life of Johnson, or Eckermann's
Conversations of Goethe, but the ideas were not reduced
to writing, either by the speaker or a friend. Goethe
once said that every genius has in his lifetime been ac-
quainted with men who were obscure and unproductive,
but who possessed greater intellects, more originality
than those geniuses themselves.

There is no dividing line between the genius and the

ii6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

talented or even average person, any more than there
is a marked boundary between the normal and the ab-
normal.

The genius, however, always has something of the
pioneer in him; even after his work is no longer new,
he retains the title of genius, though there are people who
caii write better works than he.

The world has agreed on some geniuses. Most people
are ready to admit that a few men of letters like Shake-
speare, Moliere, Cervantes, Goethe and Balzac were
geniuses of the first order. But when we are concerned
with literary men who have done good work, it is not
easy to say whether they were geniuses, though we are
ready enough to admit that they had the qualities that
make up genius.

The genius must be able to do more than write of the
repressions which he has actually experienced; he must
be a master of technique and means of expression. He
must be able to describe with force and imagination,
those repressions he has witnessed others suffer. The
more use he makes of his unconscious, the nearer he gets
to truth, and it has often been the lot of genius to depict
those very emotions which society wants to be kept in
the unconscious; and the more he draws on his uncon-
scious, the less use he has for actual experience.

Yet the ability to present works of human interest
that appeal to the public does not alone constitute
genius; otherwise many of the thrillers of the movies
would be works of genius. Nor does the writing of sad
tales or giving ideal pictures make genius. There must
be an important idea, or the presentation of the emotion
in a particularly compelling manner. Then there is
something cumulative about genius; we expect from it a
repetition of literary feats that is beyond the power of

GENIUS AS PRODUCT OF UNCONSCIOUS 117

most writers; we are not contented with an isolated liter-
ary effort. Still, there are poets who are regarded as
geniuses though they have produced but one or a few
pieces of importance.

The literary genius then has a keen insight into the
psychology of the repression of the emotions and can
beautifully express this repression and make valuable
intellectual deductions therefrom. He can vary this
work for many years, and move people who think.

CHAPTER IX

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND THE NEUROSES

The emotions that literature deals with bear a close
analogy to symptoms in the neuroses or nervous diseases.
Every emotional conflict, every repressed love is an in-
cipient neurosis, and often the sufferings described in
books are full-fledged cases of neuroses. The author
may unintentionally draw characters suffering griefs
which the physician can recognise as analogous to the
cases he has observed in practice. The writer may show
how the character cures himself of his neuroses by being
made aware of the unconscious forces struggling within
him, or how the sufferer effects a recovery by sublimation,
or how he succumbs to his disease.

Some authors like Rousseau in his Confessions, or
Strindberg in his Confessions of a Fool, give us detailed
accounts of their neuroses, though they may not always
exactly fathom the causes. Poets have in their collec-
tions of lyrics told us of the sufferings that they have
personally gone through, and the trained scientist can
see to what neuroses the symptoms described are re-
lated. Other authors have in the guise of fictitious char-
acters described the neuroses they have been suffering.
Byron in his Manfred, Hauptmann in his Heinrich in the
Sunken Bell, Shakespeare in Hamlet, Goethe in Faust,
have told us of love repressions that were their own, and

ii8

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 119

these characters can be studied by critics as neurotic
patients are analysed by physicians.

The author may draw himself in the guise of a char-
acter who is utterly insane, as Cervantes did in Don
Quixote. One feels here that the author was his own
knight; in fact, he too had a sneaking fondness for
books of chivalry, and the familiarity that his hero shows
with them is good evidence that Cervantes was a careful
student of that kind of literature. He too had been
bruised by windmills; he too found that the real did not
coincide with his ideals. It is most likely that Don
Quixote developed his mental illness by his abstinence
from love, by living in fancy with the high dames he
read about, and by cherishing an affection unrecipro-
cated for the peasant girl he called in his madness Dul-
cinea del Toboso. At least these factors cannot be
ignored in the insanity he developed from 'reading books
of chivalry. It is not improbable that Cervantes drew
on a real woman for Dulcinea; he too had wasted affection
on some woman, ignorant and coarse, whom he took for
a lady of high degree. We do know that in the year he
married, in 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, he had an
illegitimate daughter by a certain woman. There is
alsa a tradition that he had a few years previously a
daughter by a noble lady in Portugal, and though this
story is discredited, it must have had some basis in real-
ity. However, Cervantes, though not, like his knight,
suffering a mental ailment, must have had a neurosis on
which he drew for the material of this novel; it was no
doubt caused by his worship of a Dulcinea del Toboso.

Writers like D'Annunzio and Dostoievsky have given
us complete cases of neuroticism; they described them-
selves in their books. Since the line between the normal
and the abnormal psychic condition is hard to draw, and

120 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

we all daily or at different crises in our lives overstep
the limits, the works of literary men as a rule deal with
those cases where the morbid and normal merge. Freud
said that no author has avoided all contact with psychia-
try. And he is assuredly right. Dickens's eccentric
characters, Balzac's heroes and villains in the grip of
great passions,"* neurotics like Bunyan, A'Kempis and
Pascal, whose repressed love no doubt made them relig-
ious maniacs; lago, Richard the Third, Macbeth, Ham-
let, Anthony and Timon of Shakespeare, the leading
characters of Ibsen, the unhappy Heine, De Musset, Bau-
delaire, Verlaine, Leopardi, Carducci, Burns, Byron, Shel-
ley, Keats, Poe and Heam can all be studied like patients
suffering from neuroses. In fact all characters in fiction
who suffer are related to neurotics, for sex and love is
usually the cause of their troubles, for as Freud says, "In
a normal sex life no neurosis is possible." The author oc-
casionally deals with severe cases of neuroses, and the
psychiatrists with mild ones, and their provinces are often
the same. The writer details his case with art, and lays
stress on the emotional phase and deduces ideas, while
the psychiatrist gives us bare scientific analyses. "The
author," says Freud, "cannot yield to the psychiatrist
nor the psychiatrist to the author, and the poetic treat-
ment of a theme from psychiatry may result correctly
without damage to beauty." {Delusion and Dream.)
^ Cases of neurosis often especially lend themselves fo
literary treatment. Think of the women sufferers in lit-
erature like Madame Bovary, Hester Prynne, Anna Kare-
nina, Hedda Gabler, Magda; you can always trace their «/'
troubles to love repressions. Fictitious characters who
have not had a natural outlet for their love and have
been abstinent, or have had a love disappointment or

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 121

have suffered from aberrations of the infantile love life,
present phases of neuroses.

Freud has studied Jensen's novel Gradiva, and shows
how the leading character has troubles analogous to the
psychoneuroses, and cures himself unconsciously by the
methods of psychoanalysis.

Literature records many fully developed cases of
neuroses. A story like the Fall of the House of Usher
presents a complete case of a neurosis. Characters in
literature who commit suicide, like Werther and Hedda
Gabler, are victims of neurosis; sex is usually at the bot-
tom of their difficulties. Every sufferer then in literature
is a partly or fully developed case of neurosis; at least an
emotional disturbance due to sex causes, akin to the neu-
rosis, is always present. This fact is sufficient for the lay-
men to know without their making a deep inquiry into the
nature of these neuroses and attempting to classify them.
Here the work of the physician begins and a penetrating
insight into the species of neuroses described in literature
can be made only by the psychoanalyst.

Nevertheless, there are some cases that even the lay-
man may recognise as soon as he has familiarised him-
self with the Freudian views of the neuroses. In English
the best technical books on the subject are the translation
of Hitschman's Freud's Theories of Neuroses, Brill's Psy-
choanalysis and Brink's Morbid Fears and Compulsions.
Some of Freud's own essays have been translated by Dr.
Brill in Selected Papers on Hysteria.

Freud divides the neuroses into two classes, the true
or actual neuroses, and the psychoneuroses.

The true neuroses are neurasthenia and anxiety neu-
rosis, which formerly was included under neurasthenia,
but which Freud set off as a separate class. He calls these
true neuroses because there are present abnormal dis-

122 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

turbances of the sexual function, not necessarily due to
heredity. Neurasthenia is due to excessive physical
abuse, and the anxiety neurosis results from abstinence
or unsatisfactory gratification. All agencies which pre-
vent the psychic utilisation of the physical excitement
lead to anxiety neurosis. Literature gives us cases of
true neuroses, but they are not as frequent as the other
class, the psychoneuroses.

The psychoneuroses are due to repressions but date
back to infancy; the influence of heredity is important;
imconscious factors are at work. The child's relation
to his parents and his infantile sex life have great in-
fluence on his future. The crisis comes when a love
repression in later life breaks out. The psychoneuroses
are hysteria, compulsion neurosis, and mixed cases,
especially anxiety hysteria.

In hysteria the patient suffers from reminiscences, and
his recent experiences are unconsciously attached to in-
fantile sexual impressions. Instead of solving his love
difficulties he builds fantasies. Certain mental impres-
sions remain fixed. The early painful effects struggle
to consciousness, but instead are transformed into uncom-
mon inhibitions, by a process known as conversion.

In compulsion or obsessional neuroses we also have
unconscious sexual factors at work since infancy, but
the effect of the painful idea affixes itself to other ideas,
producing obsessions. These are transformed reproaches
which have escaped the repression. Morbid fears, doubts
and temptations are the result.

The most common form of neuroses in life, and hence
most described in literature, is anxiety hysteria. They
partake of the nature of hysteria and the true neurosis,
anxiety. "In these cases," says Dr. Hitschman, "the
anxiety arises not only from somatic (physical) causes,

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 123

but from a part of the ungratified libido which embraces
unconscious complexes and through the repression of
these gives rise to neurotic anxiety." The excitation is
psychic as well as physical.

Literature abounds then chiefly in the psychoneuroses
and especially anxiety neurosis.

All literature where the author is recalling old griefs
on which he still broods, looking upon them as if they
had happened yesterday, are related to hysteria. In-
cessant complaints about early love disappointments, re-
calling all the incidents, constant memories of the mother
and of childhood days, and obstinate clinging to ideas
and pictures that were uppermost in early life, are re-
lated to hysteria. Byron and Heine, harking back all
the time to their early love woes, were really sufferers
from hysteria. Lady Macbeth, as Dr. Coriat has shown,
was a victim of hysteria.

We see obsessions at work in characters like Ibsen's
Brand who aims at all or nothing.

We find most troubles described in literature related
to anxiety hysteria, from the childish griefs of David
Copperfield, Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, to the sad
love experiences of the characters of Thomas Hardy.

Literature is largely a record of the anxieties and
hysterias of liumanity.

n

\ Byron is a good example of hysteria in literature. He

^oved Mary Chaworth, and for nineteen years, from 1805,

the date of her marriage, to his death in 1824, she

figured in nearly all his shorter love poems. She was

Astarte in Manfred. She is Lady Adeline in Don Juan,

124 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

she is, no doubt, "Thyrza"; she figured as the heroines
of his eastern tales.

In the poem, "The Dream," he refers to the irony of
fate that married each of them unhappily, and he de-
scribes his grief because he never wed her. When the
poem was published her husband was annoyed and cut
down some trees to which reference was made in the
poem, — "the diadem of trees" arranged in a circle.

There are nearly fifty lyrics in which she appears be-
yond doubt, not mentioning the bigger poems where she
often is present.

The last lines that Byron wrote in 1824, "I watched
thee when the foe was at my side," refer to her:

"To thee — to thee — e'en in the grasp of death
My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it might.
Thus much and more ; and yet thou lov'st me not
And never wilt ! Love dwells not in our will
Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still."

The word "wrongly" shows that Mary was married.

She is referred to by him in his last letters.

The "Last Words to Greece," published posthumously,
refer to Mary, and contain the same sentiment of his
famous poem, "Oh talk to me not of a name great in
story," written in 182 1, and also posthumously published.
He cares more about Mary's love than for the honours he
would attain as hero in the Grecian War. He exclaims
he is a fool of passion, and that the maddening fasci-
nation of Mary can depress him low if she frowns.

The celebrated poem to the Po River, sent May 8,
1820, to Murray, was inspired by "private feelings and
passions"; he wrote Murray that it must not be pub-
lished. The river Po in the poem really refers to the
river Trent, in England, with memories of which Mary
was bound to him.

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 125

There is no doubt about the fact that most of the
early love poems of Byron relate to Mary. Critics have,
however, failed to note her influence after the "The
Dream," written in the summer of 1816, a half a year
after his wife left him. But the reader of the later
cantos of Childe Harold and Don Juan does not have
to search too closely between the lines to detect Mary's
presence.

I think we may dispense with the theory that Byron
was a poseur and that his passion was unreal and rhe-
torical. Those lugubrious moods were unfortunately sin-
cere. He suffered from hysteria, and this was connected
with the lack of affection in infancy between him and
his mother. He is the hero and Mary is the heroine of
all his work. She made a neurotic out of him, and she
is the cause of his moods when he wrote "I have not
loved the world, nor the world me" in Childe Harold, or
"From my youth upwards my spirit walked not with the
souls of men," in Manfred. This seems strange to us
who recognise that faithful love is often a pose, and that
in real life men do not, as a rule, brood about lost sweet-
hearts when these are married to others, and that they
straightway marry themselves and smile over their past
loves, in whom in many cases they could not again find
interest.

Byron's wife inspired only two poems, — the bitter
"Lines on Hearing Lady Byron Was 111," and "Fare
Thee Well"; she was also a model for two women in
Don Juan, who are not amiably treated. His mistress, the
Countess Guiccioli, may have been in part a model in
Cain for Adah, along with Mary Chaworth, and she also
inspired Sardanapalus.

For a long time the Thyrza poems of 18 12 puzzled
critics. They were held to be addressed to no one in

126 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

general; there was a claim by some that they were ad-
dressed to a man, a friend he loved. But there can be
no doubt that Mary furnished the chief inspiration. In
Childe Harold, Canto II-9, he refers to Mary in the line
"love and life together fled," and in a Thyrza poem he
uses the words, "When love and life alike were new."
Mary Chaworth was really responsible for Byronism.

Whether she ever committed adultery with him and
had a child by him, as is claimed by the author of
Byron, the Last Phase, one cannot say.

In his four early volumes of poetry, published before he
was twenty-one, there are many poems inspired by Mary,
and four poems, written in 1805, addressed to Caroline,
who was undoubtedly Mary, are of especial excellence.
The poems of his youth written to her included the
"Fragment," written after her marriage, in 1805, and
"Remembrance," written the year after. Both of these
poems were published after Byron's death. A pathetic
poem, In the Hours of Idleness (1807), is "To a Lady";
"Oh, had my fate been linked with thine." "When We
Two Parted" was written the following year, and re-
ferred to Mary. In 1808 Byron wrote a series of sad
love poems to Mary, and they were published in the next
year, in 1809, in Hobhouse's Imitations and Translations.
They include "Remind Me Not, Remind Me Not," "To
a Lady," "When Man Expelled from Eden's Bowers,"
"Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England," "Weill Thou
Art Happy," "And Wilt Thou Weep When I Am Low,"
and "There Was a Time I Need Not Name." The six
great poems written to Thyrza and published in 1812,
with Childe Harold, were "To Thyrza" ("Without a
stone to mark the spot"), "Away, Away, Ye Notes of
Woe," "One Struggle More and I Am Free," "Euthana-
sia," "And Thou Art Dead and Young and Fair," and

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 127

"If Sometimes in the Haunts of Men." Mary was as
if dead to him, and he wrote of her accordingly. About
the time of the Thyrza poems, 181 1 and 181 2, he wrote
other poems to her hke the "Epistle to a Friend" "I
have seen my bride another's bride" and "On Parting
New." In 1813 appeared the two sonnets, "To Genevra"
and "Remember Him Whom Passion's Power"; in 1814,
"Thou Art Not False, But Thou Art Fickle," "Fare-
well! If Ever Fondest Prayer," "I Speak Not, I Trace
Not, I Breathe Not Thy Name." In 181 5 appeared
"There's Not a Joy the World Can Give That It Takes
Away," and 181 6, "There Be None of Beauty's Daugh-
ters."

Byronism, then, was due chiefly to the poet's early
quarrels with his mother, the separation from his wife,
but above all his rejection by Mary Chaworth.

in

Freud has told us that the idea of repression is the
main pillar on which the theory of psychoanalysis rests.
There has been at some time in the patient's hfe a seri-
ous inhibition of some desire. There are different kinds
of repression, the most serious of which have a sexual
basis. But the denying oneself of the play of any
emotions that seek an outlet, constitutes a repression.

Sex with Freud means love in its broadest sense. The
most common repression is the inability to satisfy one's
love, either because the person has not met any object
upon whom to lavish his affection, or if such an individ-
ual is found there is no reciprocation, or if the love is
given it is later withdrawn. All these factors act in
a repressive manner upon a person. For it must be
understood that not only the stinting of sexual satisfac-

128 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

tion, but the interference with all those finer emotions
associated with it, cause a repression in the subject.
When the emotions have been satisfied for a long time,
and then there is a sudden cessation through change of
heart or infidelity or death of the beloved one, the re-
pression is very serious. It is this kind of repression
that has produced most of the literature of the world.

But repression includes the stinting or uprooting of
any emotion. Great grief as the result of the death of
any one we love of either sex, whether friend or relative,
is a repression. The death of a loved one puts the suf-
ferer in a worse position than the man who has been
stinted in a great love passion. And the great elegies in
literature have been cries of poets for the death of fellow
wfifCTsT Lycidas, Adonais, In Memoriam and Thyrsis
are examples. The authors here suffered repressions in
the loss of brother poets.

The grief which seems to be the greatest of all, that
following on the death of a beloved child, is an instance
of the most intense repression on the part of a parent.
Here there is nothing really sexual, but the death of a
child and the consequent agony to the parents is a far
greater repression than any purely sexual one. Hugo's
famous elegies on the death of his daughter which appear
in the Contemplations are among the greatest poems of
this kind. In America we have had a few poems by
Lowell, and a famous elegy by Emerson, The Threnody,
in which the loss of children is mourned.

If there were no repression, there would be little lit-
erature.

The varieties of repressions are as numerous as the
emotions to which we are subject. For the inability to
satisfy any emotion is a repression; the deprivation of
an emotion long gratified, the conquering of a habit or

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 129

the struggle for activity of a partially extinct emotion,
are repressions. The feeling of loneliness or homesick-
ness, which has given rise to much good literature, shows
repressed emotion. The wish to wreak revenge or to
punish evil or to do away with injustice or to devote
oneself to the following of an ambition or the pursuit of
a certain kind of labour, are all symptoms of repressions.

IV

Psychoanalysis starts with the assumption that the
entire past in a man's life, beginning with the first day
of his birth, is always with him and is really never for-
gotten. That which has seemed to pass out of the
haunts of memory, has become part of our unconscious,
and is often revived in dreams. Nothing is really ever
forgotten. De Quincey understood this and discourses
on the subject in his Confessions of an Opium Eater and
thus anticipates an important modern psychological dis-
covery.

Longfellow said, "Let the dead past bury its dead."
Ah, if it only could 1 Ghosts of sorrows and griefs that
we thought laid away still revisit us even in our wak-
ing hours. They stalk before us and open up closed
wounds and we learn that these are not yet healed. They
awaken memories of agonies that again smite us; they
make us hearken back to unkind words dealt us, to suf-
fering inflicted, to injustice done. Shocks which time
had made obtuse are revived; we reap the harvest of
anxieties garnered in our hearts; and we discover that
the old despair has not altogether vanished but still oc-
casionally gnaws us.

The dead rules the living; forgotten incidents, soul-
wrecking mistakes, chance misfortunes still dominate us.

130 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

We recall the mortification of a decade or two ago and
as its details are resurrected, we again live through the
madness of past years. Prejudices are thus built up,
unreasonable indeed. We become averse to a face that
reminds us of a countenance belonging to a person who
troubled us.

The old poverty still haunts us in our present pros-
perity; memories of unpleasant toil in the past may
make us shrink in terror in our newly found leisure or
congenial labour. Mark Twain describes how in his
prosperity he would dream that he had to return to
the hated lecture platform or that he was again a pilot
on the Mississippi River. Past solitude may still send
its roots down to the present and leave us lonely in so-
ciety. He who has known a starved body or many un-
fulfilled desires, he who has been the victim of ridi-
cule or persecution or never before been encouraged or
sympathised with, remembers the past only too well,
even when the world honours him with recognition.

Impressions are strongest in youth and hence molest
us in old age. The finer our nerves, the less easy is it
to forget. The mother who has lost a child cannot
forget the misfortune even after other children are born.

It is life's grimmest tragedy that we carry within us
ghosts of our old days — ghosts which take us by sur-
prise with their vigour. They mock us at their will;
we are tormented unawares; we travel about with them
and cannot shake them off. They stand beside us wheg
we love; they take the savour out of our food; they
dangle at our footsteps when we go to the house of
mirth; they trail us in ghastly pursuit long after we have
emerged from the house of mourning. Hence when the
poet sings and the philosopher speculates, when the story-
teller gives us a taJe, unconsciously those old ghosts are

LITERARY EMOTIONS AND NEUROSES 131

vnth him and get between the lines of his writings. An
unseen spirit seems to move his pen and he tells more
than he had desired and he gives voice to emotions thai
he had sought to suppress or regarded as long since
buried in a sepulchre that was impenetrable. But the
dead passions and tear stained griefs come gliding forth
and pierce all barriers and dictate to him. They even
wish to be remembered, to be made as enduring in art
as in life. They never weary of uttering their sen-
timents; they pursue the human race to eternity.
And when we read of the troubles of man whether in
the Bible or the Iliad, they are familiar often to us be-
cause they are our own. The author cannot escape the
past and he always opens up more channels of his heart
than he has suspected. His work shows that his old
sorrows rise up like the phcenix from its own ashes.
His ghosts appear in his art; the fires that were thought
smouldering are lighted and we as readers are caught in
the flames and are purged in them.

Psychoanalysis tries to rid us of the evil influence^
of the past by making us aware of the unconscious dis-
turbances.

CHAPTER X

THE INFANTILE LOVE LITE OF THE AUTHOR AND ITS
SUBLIMATIONS

Those who are familiar with the theories of Freud
are aware that one of his most important discoveries is
that the child before the age of puberty has a sex or
love life of its own. As he puts it, it is absurd to
imagine that sex enters suddenly at the age of puberty
just as the devils in the New Testament were supposed
to enter the swine. Freud regards the child's sucking of
its thumb as a manifestation of infantile sexuality. In
his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex he
studies the sexual life of the child. This theory which
met with much opposition is beginning to be accepted.
The studies of Moll, Havelock Ellis, and Helgemuth con-
firm Freud's views.

The value of the theory is in this: It shows that the
nature of our later emotional and especially our love life
is far more dependent upon the nature, aberrations, in-
hibitions, sublimations, developments and transforma-
tions of our infantile sex life, than we ever in our wild-
est dreams imagined it to be. Here in childhood are
laid the seeds of our future emotional life. Early re-
pression or seduction or bad training influences our later
lives. These facts are recognised by many trained par-
ents who refuse to over-fondle their children or to do

132

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 133

anything that may awaken a sexual activity too prema-
turely.

Freud's idea is of value to the literary critic for it
shows that the characteristics of an author's work may
be traced back to his infantile sex life. As a rule we
know little about the lives of literary men when they
were children, but we can often judge what the infan-
tile sex life must have been from the traits appearing
in the writers' literary performances.

Inversion or homosexuality can be traced to the child's
love life. As infants we are bi-sexual in our pre-disposi-
tions. Children display sentimental friendships fof
members of their own sex, as we all know. Even in
later life in each sex there are remnants of the other
stimted sex, breasts on the man and hairy faces on
women. Freud has given us a very interesting but by
no means full explanation of the origin of inversion. The
abnormal development is favoured by the disappearance
of a strong father in early childhood, and by the over-
attachment to the mother at the same or earlier time.
The love for the mother is soon repressed and the boy
identifies himself with her and loves other boys like
himself. He returns to that self-love which is a sec-
ond stage after auto-eroticism in the infant, and is
known as narcissism. He wishes to love those boys as
his mother has loved him. He may like women but he
transfers the excitation evoked by them to a male ob-
ject, for they remind him of his mother and he flees from
them in order to be faithful to her. He repeats through
life the mechanism by which he became an invert.

The fact then is that homosexualism is an abnormal
development from the infant's love life. It is in the germ
in all normal people, especially in those capable of in-

134 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

tense friendships. It is naturally abhorrent to us when
it vents itself in any abnormal relations.

The sublimated homosexualism whic^ we find in lit-
erature is that which gives way to outbursts of friendly
devotion, and intense and passionate grief at the loss
of a friend; it is at the root of the idea that a man
should lay his life down for his friend. Then there is
the real inversion which the world rightly stamps as
immoral.

A few examples of literature where the homosexualism
of the author's unconscious is present are Shakespeare's
Sonnets, Tennyson's In Memoriam and Whitman's Calii-
mus. These works show what capacities their authors
had for friendship. It is the habit of some intellectual
homosexuals to try to interpret these works as indicative
of homosexual practices, as an excuse and consolation to
them in their own unfortunate condition. Whitman
wrote to John Addington Ssnnonds in response to an en-
quiry about the Calamus poems that he would prefer
never to have written them if they gave any one the in-
ference that he either practised or tolerated homosexu-
alism.

Two poets of recent years who, we know, practised
homosexualism, each of whom also served jail terms,
were Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde. There were critics
who saw that certain passages in Wilde's novel The Pic-
ture of Dorian Gray, published about five years before
he went to jail, pointed to the homosexual proclivities
of the author. His curious interpretation of Shake-
speare's sonnets also shows these. It is possible that
some of the love poems written by Verlaine and which
are supposed to be addressed to women were really writ-
ten to Arthur Rimbaud, the poet he loved. This is a

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 13S

practice indulged in by homosexual poets to avoid
suspicion.

The classic stories of ideal friendship are those of
David and Jonathan, and Damon and Pythias; the most
widely known essays in ancient literature discussing
homosexual love as a legitimate pursuit are in the dia-
logues on love by Plutarch and by Plato. Theocritus
and the Greek Anthology authors refer to homosexual
love.

The only interest the subject has for the psychoana-
lytic critic of literature is in tracing the connection be-
tween the works of authors where homosexual remnants
in the form of extreme friendships are present and their
infantile sex life.

Freud's monograph on Leonardo da Vinci is the best
study we have of a homosexual artist.

It appears then that the bisexual tendency which is
in infancy in all of us, in later life may lead, where
it does not become absolutely normal, to actual homo-
sexuality, or to a sublimation of this early inverse tend-
ency; one of the manifestations of this sublimation be-
ing literary products in which friendship is exalted.

There are other perverts whose vices in later life can
be traced to the infantile sex life. These are sadists,
masochists, exhibitionists and voyeurs. The child's sex
life takes place through the pleasures which it creates
for itself in the erogenous zones, which are sensitive areas
in any part of the body. It gratifies itself mainly on
its own body; it is autoerotic. But the sexual life soon
derives pleasure through other persons as sexual objects.
There are also components or partial impulses, which

136 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

are: for causing cruelty to others (sadistic), for deriv-
ing pleasure from pain to itself (masochistic) , for show-
ing itself shamelessly (exhibitionistic), and for peeping
at others in nude state (the voyeur's instinct). As a
rule these impulses are sublimated very early, but if they
persist the perversions govern the individuals for the rest
of their lives. Where they are sublimated we have as
a result some of the most essential features of our mod-
ern cultural institutions.

The child who continued shameless for a few years
may become very vain, and as an author write indecent
literature. The child who was cruel may later in life
love contests and competitions, and write books where
cruel scenes or virulent abuse of people abound. The
infant who derived pleasure from pain inflicted on it may
be interested in solving intricate problems that as a
man annoy him with a demand for solution, and he
will torture himself in solving them. He also may be
a conformist and find pleasure in crucifying himself
upon the rack of the church and the state and the home;
or become a martyr for an idea. As a writer he would
depict martyrs or indulge in self -commiseration.

Literature shows sublimations of these impulses and
also gives evidences of the authors' perverse tendencies
where these impulses have not been sublimated; they
may contrive to exist or be buried in the unconscious.

There are many literary men who have been per-
verse in their tendencies in later life without knowing
it. Often the man who merely thinks he is fighting
Puritanism in art when he shows a tendency to describe
the nude only, or to describe people in compromising
positions, is both an exhibitionist and voyeur. These
impulses have been suppressed in him by civilisation and
he finds an outlet for his unconscious by his art. Such

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 137

literature is not so much immoral as indecent. A lit-
erary man may become an exhibitionist in his work so
as to give play to an impulse he cannot otherwise gratify.
A writer may write exhibitionistic books for money or
to attract attention or for fun, but his work shows that
psychologically he has never completely suppressed the
exhibitionistic or peeping tendencies of his childhood.
Like the child he is without shame. The feature of
the cheap and lascivious literature that is written merely
to pander to certain tastes is just in these traits.

But the traits of the exhibitionist and voyeur are found
more or less in much of the good literature of the world.
In the cases of works, however, like the Arabian Nights,
Rabelais, Chaucer, the novels of Sterne, Fielding and
many others where great genius, intellect and honesty are
displayed, the liberal minded critic is willing to smile
and pass over these exhibitionistic blemishes. In the cases
of the older works these are due to the general looseness
in speech of the times.

The application of psychoanalytic methods puts then
in a new light much of the so-called immoral literature.
In much of the indecent comic literature, like the Res-
toration dramatists, Balzac's DrM Tales, Boccaccio's
Decameron and La Fontaine's Tales, the object is to
arouse laughter by making a person accidentally exhibit
himself. The author still finds an outlet for his repressed
exhibitionism. There is a distinction between this litera-
ture and the "immoral" literature of a writer like Ibsen,
who merely differs with the current morality and ques-
tions it, and who therefore seems immoral to the con-
ventional man.

Again there is a distinction between exhibitionism in
literature and real immoral literature, where an author

138 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

tries, for example, to defend sexual crimes like rape or
seduction.

Exhibitionism then as we find it in literary men
points to infantile practices that were never completely
suppressed and are finding an outlet. It is true, other
motives may enter into the work. There may be a
disgust on the part of the writer at his fellowmen's hypo-
critical and prudish standards of modesty and shame,
and he may write to counteract these. But the exhibi-
tionism of writers like Apuleius, Petronius, Gautier or
Zola does not interfere, nay, sometimes enhances the ar-
tistic value of their works.

Another form of sublimation of exhibitionistic traits
leads to works in which the author is always boasting
or showing off, directly or indirectly. Sometimes the
sublimation process is not complete and we have ex-
amples of the exhibitionistic traits alongside of the ego-
tism. The reader will at once think of Montaigne's
Essays and Rousseau's Confessions, two of the greatest
works in the world's literature. Among ancients two of
the vainest men were Cicero and Caesar, whose writings
show that exhibitionistic traits of their infancy were
strong.

We here may consider the effects of infantile sexual
investigation. Freud says its activity labours with the
desire for looking, though it cannot be added to the
elementary components of the impulses. Many readers
may refuse to follow Freud here, where he concludes
that the great desire for knowledge in later life may
be traced to this infantile sexual curiosity. But that
there must be some connection cannot be doubted. A
child who has never displayed any curiosity as to where
it came from must be one in whom the desire for knowl-
edge has not been and probably never will be strongly de-

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 139

veloped. The child is the father of the student man.
Freud asserts in his study of Leonardo da Vinci that
there are three sublimations in later life of this curi-
osity, the most important and rarest being where a pure
scientific investigation replaces the sexual activity and is
not occupied with sexual themes. Thus he explains the
scientific work of Leonardo and his chaste life.

m

Let us now take up the other two partial impulses,
sadism and masochism, noted by Freud, and see their
effect on the literary work of a man in later life.

"The repression of the sadistic impulse," says Dr.
Brink, "produces not its annihilation but merely its
transfer from consciousness to unconsciousness. And
there, withheld from the neutralising influence of con-
scious reasoning, the impulse and the phantasies derived
from it are not only preserved without deterioration but
may even grow in vigour and intensity. Thus, despite
the fact that in many instances the individual's conscious
life is apparently singularly irreproachable, nevertheless
this life is lived coincidently with an undercurrent of
impulses of anger, hate, hostility and revenge and their
corresponding phantasies" {Morbid Fears, page 291).

This would account for the tales of horror we find in
Poe, Kipling and Jack London. To-day we do not al-
ways assault or kill our enemies. Literary men do so
by depicting scenes in literature where this is done. Jack
London describes fist fights in which he is always de-
feating his enemies. It is said that in real life he boasted
of his abilities as a fighter.

Pfister, in his Psychoanalytic Method, formulates a
law from an earlier work of his, as follows: "The re-

140 q:HE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

pressed hate of certain individuals forms phantasies out
of suitable contents of experiences, either actual or imag-
inary, according to the laws of the dream-work, by which
procedure it creates for itself imaginary gratification.
This gratification of complex comes about through the
mechanism of a disguised wish, directed towards the in-
jury of the hated person, being represented in the con-
tent of the waking dream as reahsed."

This explains the literature of hatred and how authors
come to put their enemies in books and poems. Such
works are traceable to the sex sadistic instincts of child-
hood. We find sadism in books reeking with curses.
Ovid's Ibis, directed against the person who was to blame
for his exile, is a good example; it is one of the most bit-
ter invectives in literature. We also understand now the
significance of the imaginary punishments inflicted by an
author upon his enemies. The severe chastisement in-
flicted by Dante in his Inferno upon his enemies repre-
sents the poet's wishes carried out in his imagination to
gratify him for his inability to fulfil his repressed hatred.

Literature abounds in hostile and satirical portrayals
of the author's enemies. In ancient Greece we have
many examples, the best known probably being the cari-
cature of Socrates by Aristophanes, in the Clouds.

Elizabethan literature, especially the drama, gives us
portrayals of fellow authors. Ben Jonson attacked the
dramatists Marston and Decker in The Poetaster (1601),
and they retaliated in Satiromastix. The most familiar
example in English literature of an abuse of enemies is
Pope's Dunciad. Then we have Byron's poem "The
Sketch" directed at the maid he considered responsible
for his wife's desertion of him, and Shelley's bitter
diatribe "To the Lord Chancellor" against Lord Eldon,
whose decree deprived the poet of his two children.

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 141

Richard Savage's poem "The Bastard" against his alleged
mother for neglecting him, her illegitimate son, is not
as well known as it used to be. An author who was
past master at the art of lampooning his enemies was
Heine, and his attacks on Count Platen in the Pictures
of Travel are among the most bitter in literature. All
these attacks follow one principle; the author finds an
outlet of his repressed hatred, and the desire for venge-
ance not being always possible in a physical sense, in
modern times gives rise to phantasies of vindictiveness.
The sadistic impulses of childhood are the sources of such
literary works.

Take the portrayal of Thersites in the second book of
the Iliad. This notorious character was surely some real
person whom the author knew and despised and on
whom he wreaked vengeance by drawing him. He was
some man of Homer's own time, centuries after the
Trojan War, and his type is as common to-day as it
was in the days of Homer. The poet no doubt felt
a grievance against some prattler and nonentity he knew,
and pilloried the man for posterity; the personal note
appears throughout the whole passage. Thersites is
described as ill-favoured beyond all men, bandy-legged,
lame, round-shouldered, largely bald. He tries to re-
buke his betters, and Odysseus admonishes him severely,
calling him most base of the Greeks, telling him not to
have the names of kings in his mouth and threatening
to strip and beat him. Thersites received a welt on the
back and sat down, crying. Then notice how Homer puts
his personal feelings still more into the mouth of the Greek
who laughed and said that Odysseus had done many
great deeds but this is the best he had done in that he
had stayed this prating railer. Homer thus punished some
man he did not like. It is rather odd that those who

142 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

maintain the theory of the impersonality of the epic
poem do not apply a little knowledge of human nature
in studying literature, as this is often of more value
than scholarship.

Lists may be compiled of nineteenth century novels,
where the authors drew as vUlains their enemies. Often
these are fellow authors. Dostoievsky put Turgenev
into The Possessed in an unamiable light, under the
character Karmazinoff. George Sand introduced lovers
of hers with whom she had parted in her novels, and
Chopin and De Musset have been drawn by her for
us. Balzac righted his grievance against his critic Jules
Janin by putting him in the Young Provincial in Paris.
The motive of vengeance figures considerably in litera-
ture, though at times a malevolent mischievous instinct
drives the author on, as when Dickens drew Leigh Hunt
under the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House.
Sadistic instincts are of course primitive, and where in
ancient times a man might have put his enemy out of
existence, to-day he can kill him only in imagination.
The man does not have to be a personal enemy, but may
be some character in real life who represents an idea or
follows a course of conduct that the author thinks repre-
hensible. Demosthenes, Cicero, Milton, Swift and the
author of the Junius letters knew how to castigate their
enemies. Hugo's attacks on Napoleon in his Chatiments
and Napoleon the Little are among the most bitter in
literature.

An excellent analysis of hatred is found in Hazlitt's
Pleasure of Hating, where he shows hatred is a real in-
stinct and needs satisfaction — it is a remnant of sav-
age days. Hazlitt's attack on Gifford presents many
opportunities for the study of the psychology of hatred.

There are other cases of sublimated sadism in prac-

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 143

tically all literature where pain is described. The
author displays a craving to see people suffer even
where he sympathises with them and he satisfies that
craving by drawing them in their agonies. Take Flau-
bert's keen interest in describing the torture and suf-
ferings physically inflicted on Salammbo's lover Matho.
There is hardly anything more sadistic in literature than
the conclusion of Salammbo.

Sadism is often sublimated into interest in contests.
One of the most ancient examples we have of such sub-
limation is in Pindar's Odes, where contests in Greek
games are described and the victors praised. We have
sadism, in fact, in all tales of competition where some
one is vanquished.

The sadistic trait is the source of the glee with which
people watch some one in a moving' picture being beaten
or hurt. It is the cause of the pleasure and interest we
find in reading of executions, battles and physical suf-
fering. There is nothing strange in tracing all this to the
delight we had as children in torturing animals. This is
a partial sexual impulse and is sublimated in most of
us in later life and finds expression in our literature.

It is held that masochism is usually found side by
side with sadism. Literature is also rich in sublimated I
masochism. Many authors are apparently only happy
in their woe. They find delight in torturing themselves
and in recounting their sufferings. Many of them were
not as unhappy as they persuaded us to believe. The
whole school of woe that had its origin in Rousseau and
that was prominent in the early decades of the nine-
teenth century was full of sublimated masochism.
Hence it has been called insincere. Byron and Cha-
teaubriand were regarded, though not justly, as affect-
ing woes they never really felt. Some of the sonneteers

144 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

who imitated the Italians before and even during the
Elizabethan period wrote about woes they never felt.
This is, however, not the usual thing, and the greatest
Elizabethan sonneteers like Shakespeare, Spenser and
Sidney described real troubles.

Another phase of sublimated masochism is the at-
tempt to torture one's self to solve puzzles and prob-
lems, and vex one's self more for the sheer delight in
unravelling difficult situations than for the pursuit of
knowledge. Note how children like to solve puzzles
in newspapers. Poe, who had the sadistic instinct in
sublimation, also had the masochistic impulse. We are
familiar with his interest in reading cryptograms and
with his paper on the subject. We remember his essays
on studying persons' characters from their autographs.
His stories of ratiocination like the Gold Bug, the Mur-
der in the Rue Morgue, the Purloined Letter are ex-
amples of sublimated masochism. His Dupin, the de-
tective, is an example of a man who likes to annoy
himself; Sherlock Holmes is the best known modern
example. Indeed the interest in tales of mystery and
detective stories shows the power of the masochistic in-
stinct in human nature.

Still another example of sublimated masochism is
found in stories and plays where the idea of self sacri-
fice and penance figures. Dante's Purgatorio is a good
illustration of the author's masochistic tendencies as the
Inferno is of his sadism. He who tortures himself
whether to follow the laws of society or to fight them
is masochistic. Hence the tales of martyrs and heroes
and idealists all betray the sublimated masochistic im-
pulse. Both the rebel and the conformist, because they
embrace torture, one might say almost willingly (though
they really cannot help it), are masochistic. All litera-

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 145

ture describing these types show that the author has a
keen interest in this satisfaction in one's suffering, and
are the results, if Freud is right, of the author's infantile
delight to suffer, which became later sublimated.

Rousseau describes the pleasure he received from
beatings, and this masochism is seen in his Confessions,
where he tells us of his woes with apparent enjojnnent
in them.

All this is significant. Freud says: "Children who
are distinguished for evincing special cruelty to animals
and plajnnates may justly be suspected of intensive and
premature sexual activity in the erogenous zones; and
in a simultaneous prematurity of all sexual impulses,
the erogenous sexual activity surely seems to be primary.
The absence of the barrier of sympathy carries with it
the danger that the connections between cruelty atad
erogenous impulses formed in childhood cannot be broken
in later life." ( Three Contributions — Page 54.)

There is then a connection between the sadism and
masochism of early infancy which is related to sex, and
the sublimations in art of those impulses. People who
can hate fiercely or are vindictive or have a tendency
towards cruelty or who like to torture themselves are
as a rule of strong sex impulses.

IV

There are other phases of infantile sexual life that
rule a person for life. One of these is that stage be-
tween the first period of the child's first sex life known
as autoeroticism when it finds pleasure from its own
body, and the period when it selects an object to love
apart from itself. This stage is called narcissism be-
cause then the child loves itself. Many people never

146 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

grow out of this; we are all more or less narcisstic.
This narcissism is the basis of egoism in literature and
is no doubt related to extreme individualism. Stimer,
Nietzsche, and Stendhal, who rank intellectually among
the greatest writers the world has had, are largely nar-
cisstic.

Walt Whitman would form a good subject for study
of the manner in which infantile narcisstic sex life
is sublimated in later hfe into individualism.

The following are passages from the Song of Myself,
showing that the narcisstic infantile life of Whitman
was sublimated into good poetry and philosophy:

"While they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire

myself.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man

hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall

be less familiar than the rest . . .
Having pried through the strata, analysed to a hair, counsel'd

with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones. . . .
Divine am I, inside and out, and I make holy whatever I

touch or am touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
The head more than churches, bibles and all creeds.
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the

spread of my body, or any part of it.
Translucent mould of me it shall be you! . . .
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious."

His early narcissism did not lead him into selfishness
but taught him self-respect.
He says in the Song of Myself:

"1 am an acme of things accomplished and an encloser of

things to be. . . .
I chant the chant of dilation or pride;
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough. . . ."

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 147

In From Blue Ontario's Shore, he writes:

"It is not the earth, it is not America who is so great.

It is I who am great or to be great, it is you up there or any

one. . . .
Underneath all, individuals,

I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals.
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to

one single individual — ^namely to You. . . .
I will confront these shows of the day and night,
I will know if I am to be less than they. . . .
I will see if I have no meaning, while the houses and ships

have meaning."

The following lines from / Sing the Body Electric is
another example:

"O my body ! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men
and women, nor the likes of the parts of you;

I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes
of the soul and that they are the soul.

I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems,
and that they are my poems. . . ."

Where Whitman shows sublimations of these infantile
phases he deduces important and profound views of life
to make us happier. He questions whether the giving
up of some of the heritages we surrendered to cultural
demands has not made us also part with some valuable
emotions and whether we have not denied ourselves
rights we ought to resume. He makes egoism respect-
able, and deduces individualism from it.

I also wish to mention that sexual aberration, in which
an object unfit for the sexual aim is substituted for the
normal one, and is known as fetichism. We need not
go into the causes of it, but psychoanalysis has shown

148 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

that smell plays a part. We often find poets celebrating
the eyebrows, the gloves, and other objects connected
with the women they love. Though a certain amount
of fetichism is normal in love, literature gives us in-
stances where it amounts to an aberrated passion in the
author. There is much fetichism in Gautier's stories,
where he dwells on the fetichistic characteristics of his
heroes in whom he describes himself. Then those poems
where the sparrows and dogs of the beloved are described
as if the author were in love with them because of their
associations, those tales where too much attention is
given to the dress of the heroines, all have fetichistic
traces.

A phase of sex life in the child that is significant for
the future is the sublimation that occurs in the sexual
latency period between the third and fifth year, when
the sentiments of shame, loathing and morality appear.
These are reaction formations to the perverse tendencies
of infancy. They are brought about at the cost of the
infantile sexuality itself. These sublimations take place
in the beginning in this latency period, and if they do
not occur there is an abnormal development and the re-
sult is the latter perversions of life. When we say a
man has no moral sense, we mean not only that he
does not know the difference between right and wrong
but that he is not disgusted or shamed at sexual con-
duct that is held in abhorrence by most people. Hence
those authors who have this indifference to perverse
moral conduct in their work, never as children in the
latency period developed shame or disgust. All this is
again evidence of the influence of the sublimations in
childhood upon later literary work and view points.
Girls as a rule develop this sense of morality earlier
than boys, and this no doubt accounts to some extent

INFANTILE LOVE LIFE OF AUTHOR 149

for the prudishness of most women writers. The de-
velopment is greater and we therefore find no women
Rabelais in literature.

It is no exaggeration then to say that the infantile
sex life governs the psychology of the future writer and
the nature and tendency of his work.

CHAPTER XI

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM IN LITEEATUEE

The repression of the libido includes the damming
and clogging up of all the emotional concomitants that
go with sexual attraction and make up the feeling called
love. Whenever then sex or libido is referred to in
psychoanalysis the word has the widest meaning. The
man who loves a woman with the greatest affection and
passion, without gratifying these, suffers a repression of
the libido, as well as the man who satisfies certain pro-
clivities without feeling any tenderness or love for the
woman. In the emotion felt towards the other sex called
love, in which admiration, respect, self-sacrifice, tender-
ness and other finer feelings play a great part, there is
consciously or unconsciously, however, the physical at-
traction. If this is totally absent the emotion cannot be
called "love." What differentiates our feelings towards
one of the opposite sex from those felt for one of the
same sex (assuming there are no homosexual leanings)
is the presence of this sexual interest. Love then must
satisfy a man physically as well as psychically. It is a
concentration of the libido upon a person of the opposite
sex, accompanied by tender feelings.

Hence when we read the most chaste love poem, we
see what is the underlying motive in the poet's uncon-

150

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 151

scious. He may write with utter devotion to the loved
one and express a wish to die for her, and though he says
nothing about physical attraction, we all know that it is"
there in his unconscious. It is taken for granted that
a man who writes a real love poem to a girl wants to
enjoy her love. And when the poet complains because
he is rejected or deceived, or of something interfering
with the course of his love, we are aware also that his
unconscious is grieved because his union is impeded or
entirely precluded. The suffering is greater the more
he loves, for his finer instincts, as well as his passion,
are prevented from being fulfilled.

Let us take at random a few innocent poems and test
the theory. There is Ben Jonson's well known toast,
"Drink to me only with thine eyes." He tells how he
sent Celia a rose wreath, that she breathed on it and
sent it back to him.

"Since when it grows, and smells, I swear.
Not of itself but thee."

Odour is an important feature, it is well known, in sexual
attraction. In this poem the poet, after having received
the returned rose breathed upon by Celia, smells her
perfume, which now submerges the natural fragrance
of the rose. In other words the poet's unconscious says
that he wishes to possess Celia physically. He is talk-
ing symbolically in the poem.

There is the song in Tennj^on's "The Miller's Daugh-
ter," beginning "It is the miller's daughter." The poet
says naively enough that he would like to be the jewel
in her ear in order to touch her neck, the girdle about
her waist ("I'd clasp it round so close and tight"),
and the necklace upon her balmy bosom to fall and rise;

152 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

"I would lie so light, so light." The unconscious sex-
ual feelings here are only too apparent. The symbols
of the earring, girdle and necklace are unmistakable.
The poet is saying in a symbohcal manner that he would
possess the miller's daughter.

Moreover one may see the sex motive in poems where
it does not seem to appear. If certain facts in an au-
thor's life are known, we may discern the unconscious
love sentiments in poems where no mention seems to be
made of them. Let me illustrate with a fine poem by
Longfellow, the familiar "The Bridge." Take the lines

"How often, O how often,
I had wished that the ebbing tide
Would bear me away in its bosom
O'er the ocean wild and wide!

"For my heart was hot and restless.
And iny life was full of care,
And the burden laid upon me
Seemed greater than I could bear.

"But now it has fallen from me, etc."

To the student of Longfellow, this poem speaks of the
time he found it difficult to win the love of his second
wife, Frances Appleton, love for whom he confessed in
his novel Hyperion, where he drew her and himself.
This story was published before she had as yet recipro-
cated his love. He married her July 13, 1843. He fin-
ished the poem October 9, 1845. At the end of this year
he wrote in his diary that now he had love fulfilled and
his soul was enriched with affection. He is therefore
thinking of the time when he had no love and longed
for it, and now that he has it, he is thinking of the
love troubles of others. In the olden days he wanted to
be carried away by the river Charles, for his long court-
ship, seemingly hopeless, made his heart hot and rest-

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 153

less and his life full of care. So we see that in this
poem the poet was thinking of something definite, relat-
ing to love (and hence also sex), though there is no
mention of either in the poem.

It is well known that all love complaints are the cries
of the Jack who cannot get his Jill; or who has lost
the possibility of love happiness by desertion, decep-
tion or death.

Read that fine and pathetic Scotch ballad, beginning
"O waly, waly up the bank." The girl (or woman)
has been forsaken by her lover and expects to become
a mother. She longs for death. She Complains about
the cruelty of love grown cold; she recalls the happy
days. Her unconscious sentiment is that her lover will
never give her spiritual happiness or satisfy her craving.
Her life is empty. The poem was based on an actual
occurrence. It contains all the despair of love that was
once given and then withdrawn.

"O wherefore should I busk ray head.
Or wherefore should I kame my hair?

"When we came in by Glasgow town.
We were a comely sight to see;
My love was clad in the black velvet
And I myself in cramasie."

She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as
she has no lover. Among other great love wails by a
woman are the old Saxon elegy "A Woman's Complaint"
and the second Idyl of Theocritus.

All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repress-
ing of the tender as well as of the physical emotions, to
the damming up of the libido, which is love in its broad-
est sense.

Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real
loss, or suggest it in such a manner that we feel the

1 54 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

thought has become conscious in the poem. Read in
Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" the fifteen lines beginning,
"Is it well to wish thee happy," and one can see that the
victim is suffering because Amy is in another's em-
brace rather than in that of the singer's. He thinks with
maddening thoughts of the clown she married.

"He will hol3 thee, when his passion shall have spent its

novel forces,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."

He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband
and take his hand. "He will answer to the purpose."
The singer clearly shows his pain because he has been
cheated out of physical pleasure.

When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung
plainly. One of the most beautiful poems of this kind
is Dowson's Cynara. The poem is frankly sexual. The
poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper's daugh-
ter, tries to console himself with another woman for his
loss. The words "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara,
in my fashion" mean he loves her in others. He tries
to satisfy himself partly by thinking he is with her while
he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual
repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not
arouse it and how the poet forces himself to imagine
that he is with the one who created it. The poem
makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint
that the libido is being dammed.

It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest
and sweetest love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley
for instance, one sees the play of unconscious sexual
forces. This fact does not make the poem aniJf the less
moral or the poet any the less pure. '

\/

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM ISS

n

Probably the greatest objection to the application of
psychoanalytic methods to literature will be made to the
transference of the sexual interpretation of symbols from
the realm of dreams to that of art. But if the interpre-
tation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the other.
, Civilisation has made it necessary to refer in actual
speech to sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic
representations; our faculty of wit, due to the exercise
of the censorship, also uses various devices of symboli-
sation. Dreams and literature both make use of the
same symbols.

When Freud attributed sexual significance to certain
typical dreams like those of riding, flying, swimming,
climbing, and to certain objects, like rooms, boxes, snakes,
trees, burglars, etc., he made no artificial interpretations.
He merely pointed out the natural and concrete language
of the unconscious.

Now the same interpretation must inevitably follow
in literature, much as authors and readers may object.
If flying in dreams is symbolic of sex, then an author
who is occupied considerably with wishes to be a bird
and fly or with descriptions of birds flying — ^I do not
mean an isolated instance — is like the man who is al-
ways dreaming he is flying; he is unconsciously ex-
pressing a symbolical wish. Many poems written to
birds in literature show unconscious sexual manifesta-
tions. Shelley's "To A Skylark," Keats's "To A Nightin-
gale" and Poe's "Raven" are poems where the authors
sang of repressed love; there is unconscious sex symbol-
ism in them.

Wordsworth, one of the poets who rarely mentioned

IS6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

sex, has in his "To a Skylark" unconsciously given us
a poem of sexual significance. The motive of the poem
is the intense longing to fly. But beneath the wish to fly
in the poem, as in the imaginary flsdng in the dream,
a sexual meaning is concealed. The poet is sad when
he writes the poem "I have walked through wildernesses
dreary, and to-day my heart is weary." He also thinks
of the fact that the bird is satisfied in love. "Thou hast
a nest for thy love and thy rest."

Very few of the poems addressed to birds harp on
the wish to fly to the extent that Wordsworth does in
this poem. Nearly half of the poem is taken up with
this wish, and for this reason the sexual interpretation
is unmistakable.

The first two stanzas are as follows:

"Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds !
Singing, singing,

With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind!

"I have walked through wildernesses dreary
And to-day my heart is weary;
Had I now the wings of a Fairy,
Up to thee would I fly.
There is madness about thee, and joy divine,
In that song of thine;
Lift me, guide me high and high
To thy Isanqueting place in the sky."

The wish in literature corresponds to the fulfilment
in the dream, and the psychology of the poet who wishes
to fly is like that of the dreamer who does fly. Uncon-
scious sex symbolism is voiced in poems where the poet
expresses a desire to be a bird, or fly like one, such as

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 157

those by Bernard de Ventadom, the great Troubadour of
the twelfth century, "The Cuckoo," by Michael Bruce,
the Scotch poet who died young from consumption,
and others.

I quote from memory the chorus of a poem sung in
my school days:

"Oh, had I wings to fly like you
Then would I seek my love so true,
And never more we'd parted be.
But live and love eternally."

The author here tells us most plainly why he or she
wants to fly like a bird — for the satisfaction of love. He
says practically that merely by flying like the bird, he
would have the embrace of the loved one. The open-
ing lines of the chorus show that it is no far-fetched
idea, that of seeing sex or love symbolism in birds
flying or singing.

We recall Bums's famous poem to the bonny bird
that sings happily and reminds him of the time when
his love was true. "Thou'U break my heart, thou bon-
ny bird," he sings in despair. A false lover stole the
rose and left the thorn with him. The entire poem is
full of sex symbolism. That he too would like to have
love, is what he says when he speaJss of the bird singing.

"The more one is occupied with the solution of
dreams," says Freud, "the more willingly one must be-
come to acknowledge that the majority of the dreams
of adults treat of sexual material and give expression
to erotic wishes. ... No other impulse has had to
undergo as much suppression from the time of child-
hood as the sex impulses in its numerous components;
from no other impulse has survived so many and such
intense unconscious wishes, which now act in the sleep-

1S8 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

ing state in such a manner as to produce dreams."
This, to my mind, can not be contested, and these
wishes appear Icirgely in the form of symbols. In early
times sex was given great significance, and we know that
in early myths and literature many events and things
were sex symbols. When we dream symbolically, we
go back to a method of picturing events that in early
history had value, but of which the significance has been
forgotten. The law of symbol formation is in dreams^
not an arbitrary one; it is based on forms of speech
in the past and on witty conceptions of to-day. Folk-
lore and wit are full of sexual symbols corresponding to
those in dreams. All doubt has been removed of sexual
symbolism in dreams by an experiment made by means
of hypnotism, where a patient was told to dream some
sexual situation. Instead of doing so directly she
dreamed a situation in symbolic form corresponding to
that in ordinary dream life. Rank and Sachs in their
The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sci-
ences have given us an excellent study of the nature of
symbol formation. Freud has furnished us a list of ob-
jects and actions that are of sexual significance. W.
Stekel has made an exhaustive study of the subject in
his Sprache des Traumes (1911). Freud recognises R.
A. Schemer as the true discoverer of symbolism in
dreams in his book Das Lebendes Traumes (1896), but
he admits that Artemidorus in the second century A.D.
also interpreted dreams sjmibolically.
/ Freud ventures the opinion that dreams aboul _com-
plicated machinery and landscapes and trees have a
deBnitr3_ftXflal:5igHiKanSr"ir't}iis is so, and T5e~gives
fifs reason therefor, it would mean that all those authors
who have a partiality for describing landscapes and ma-
chinery in their works continually, are unconsciously re-

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 159

vealing a personal trait they never intended to convey.
Ruskin for example is rich in landscapes in his works.
Is there any connection between his propensity for such
description and his attachment to his mamma, his youth-
ful love disappointment, his unsuccessful marriage and
his sad love for Rose La Touche? Is it not likely that
many of the painters who made a specialty of landscape
painting were driven to this special choice by an un-
conscious cause that the world has not fathomed, a sexual
one? No doubt there is a connection between paintings
of female nudes and the sex life of the author in his
unconscious; why should not the same be true of the
landscape painters and all the writers who abound in
landscape descriptions? Is it not possible that Turgenev,
who has given us so many landscapes, was unconsciously
thinking of his first love disappointment and also of
his love for Madame Viardot? We find landscapes in
every literary work that deals with the country, but
Freud's theory can have applicability only to the author
who has a mania for them.

Why does Kipling have a keen interest in bringing
descriptions of machinery into his works? If dreams of
machinery relate to sex, then we must follow the logical
conclusion that an undue interest in machinery must
evince a sexual meaning. We are also aware that a large
number of popular sexual terms are taken from instru-
ments in the machine-shop.

I do not maintain that objects do not have a literal
significance, free from any symbolic intent.

There can be no doubt about the significance of the
phallic worship of old times, in which the serpent was
symbolic. Dreams where the serpent figures and folk
tales telling of dragons who are symbolic of the lustful
side of man both have a sexually symbolic meaning.

i6o THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

Again, if Freud is right in claiming that the dream
of a woman throwing herself in the water is a parturition
dream, then one would have to conclude that a woman
occupied constantly with stories about herself swimming
was probably absorbed with thoughts about child-bear-
ing. That this significance for such a dream is not
absurd may be seen from the following statement by
Freud: "In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery of a
child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by
distortion as the entry of the child into water; among
many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and
Bacchus are well known illustrations of this."

in

Freud was not the first one to interpret dreams sym-
bolically. There have been excellent symbolical interpre-
tations in Uterature. I will mention one in Chaucer and
another in Ovid.

In Chaucer's TroUus and Criseyde, one of the great-
est love poems ever written and probably a greater work
of art than any of the Canterbury Tales, there is a
true symbolic interpretation of an anxiety dream. Troi-
lus was pining for his love, Criseyde, who had been led
back by Diomede to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor.
Troilus dreamt that he saw a boar asleep in the sun
and that Criseyde was embracing and kissing it. His
suspicions as to her faithfulness were confirmed by the
interpretation given by his sister Cassandra, who told
him that Criseyde now loved Diomede; Diomede was
descended from Meleager the slayer of the boar, which,
according to the myth, once ravaged among the Greeks.

Chaucer throughout his works attacks the theory that
dreams may be interpreted, but he gives us a true sym-

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM i6i

bolical interpretation in this poem. He also here record-
ed unconsciously some of his own past griefs in love.
Freud taught that anxiety dreams were due to the repres-
sion of the libido being converted into fear. We also
know from anthropology that the boar was a sexual sym-
bol. In the poem Diomede appears to Troilus as a boar,
also, because Troilus had heard the story of Meleager
and the boar and of the ancestry of Diomede. Even
though he had forgotten the tale, if he did, since he was
reminded of it by his sister, it was still present in his
unconscious. His anxiety was due to the fear that
Diomede had really won Criseyde. The fear that he
experienced at day, that his sweetheart would be lost
to him — the anxiety that his libido would be repressed,
become an anxiety dream in which the boar is the symbol
of his rival.

In the fifth elegy of the third book of Ovid's Amores,
the author reports a symbolical dream of the loss of his
love. It is correctly interpreted, in a Freudian manner,
by an interpreter of dreams. The poet dreamed that he
took shelter from the heat in a grove under a tree. He
saw a very white cow standing before him, and her mate,
a horned bull, near her chewing his cud. A crow pecked
at the breast of the cow and took away the white hair.
The cow left the spot; black envy was in her breast
as she went over to some other bulls. The interpreter
told Ovid that the heat which the poet was seeking to
avoid was love, that the cow was his white-complexioned
mistress and that he was the bull. The crow was a
procuress who would tempt his mistress to desert him.
The sexual symbolic interpretation shows that Freud's
most unpopular idea was known among the Romans.
It happened that Ovid's mistress did prove unfaithful to
him and he complained of the fact. His dream arose,

1 62 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

however, from his day fears, and he had previously writ-
ten a poem in the Amores against a procuress.

Ovid is one of the greatest love poets in all literature,
and his Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his Heroides trans-
lated by Pope records some of his own love griefs, though
these are recorded in his Amores directly.

The symbolism that psychoanalysis deals with is that
of the unconscious. S3mibols may have the most signifi-
cance when the dreamer or writer least suspects it. And
it is only by the study of folk-lore, wit and the neuroses
that one gets to see their meaning.

No doubt the critic who examines literary master-
pieces to find sexual symbols will not be a popular one;
but that does not alter the fact that the sexual mean-
ing is there. The field will no doubt be taken up in the
future by some critic who will not fear to brave public
wrath.

It will be seen that many writers who were deemed
respectable and pure because they never dealt with sex-
ual problems are full of sex S3mibolism. They consciously
strove to conceal their sex interest, but their uncon-
scious use of sex s3rmbolism shows that they were not
as indifferent to the problems as they would lead us to
imagine.

Browning rarely wrote directly of sex. He is admired
justly by all lovers of literature; and women are among
his most enthusiastic lovers. It is true one of his poems,
the "Statue and the Bust," has puzzled his women ad-
mirers. Adultery seems to be defended here. Now
there are some innocent poems of the poet rich in sex
symbolism. It is well known that dreams of riding on
horse-back, rocking, or any form of rhythmic motion
through which the dreamer goes, are sexually symbolical.
In older literature and in colloquial language the word

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 163

to ride is used in a sexual sense. Browning is especially
addicted to writing poems describing the pleasure of
riding, or poems in rhythmic verse which suggest the
riding process. It has never dawned on critics to sug-
gest that there may be a cause for this that is to be
found in the unconscious of the author.

Take his "The Last Ride Together." The speaker who
is rejected asks his love to give him the pleasure of a
last ride with her. Not being able to get the pleasures
of love from her, he seeks them in another form, a S5mi-
bolic one. He will now imagine that he receives them;
he is prompted to his strange request by unconscious
causes. He wants a substitute for the actuality. "We
ride and I see her bosom heave," he says. Every stanza
says something about the riding. "I ride," "We ride,"
"I and she ride" are repeated throughout the poem. He
addresses the poet, the sculptor and the musician and
tells them that he is riding instead of creating art; by
this he means that they express their longing to love in
art; he does so by riding. "Riding's a joy." He also lies
to himself and pretends he is not angry at Lis mistress
and that perhaps it was best he didn't win her love; he
pretends he has no regrets for the past and that he is
satisfied with the ride instead of her love. The poem
is an excellent example of the unconscious use of sym-
bolism in literature. The meaning is clear.

Two other poems of Browning where sexual sym-
bolism may be present though there is nothing of love
in the poems are the famous "How They Brought the
Good News from Aix to Ghent" and "Through the Me-
tidja to Abd-El-Kadr." The sexual significance can be
seen in the rhythmic swing, for both poems suggest the
motion of the horse rider. The effect in the latter poem
is produced by the use of the words "I ride" twice in

1 64 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the first, third and eighth lines of each of the five stanzas,
thirty times, and by having each of the forty lines end
with "ride" or a rhyme to "ride."

"As I ride, as I ride,
With a full heart for my guide,
So its tide rocks my side, as I ride,
As I ride, as I ride.
That, as I were double-eyed,
He, in whom our tribes confide.
Is descried, ways untried
As I ride, as I ride."

TV

1 do not believe that nature worship idea in literature
has been yet fully analysed. Critics have refused to see
the exact meaning of the expression "love of nature."
The poets themselves have told us that they saw in
nature lessons of moral improvement and inspirations
for humanitarianism. Granting that this is so, the fact
still remains that there is much left unsaid by the poets.
Some of them recognised the real significance of their
love for nature when they told us how they were inspired
by her to love, or were reminded of their lack of love.

Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest nature poets
the world has ever had, appears singularly free from the
voicing of the love passion in his work. Except for the
Lucy poems and a few others, he has given us little love
poetry. Hazlitt complained that he found no mar-
riages or giving in marriage in Wordsworth's poetry. But
nevertheless the sex element is there though never di-
rectly expressed. There is nothing, it is well known, cal-
culated to make a man long for the love of woman or
to miss her more than when he is in the presence of
nature. Anthropology teaches us the close connection
between love and nature. When Wordsworth sang of

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 165

the beauties of nature he was voicing a cry for satisfied
love which he did not have up to his thirtieth year, when
he married. He was also pining for love of the girl
he met in France in his twenty-third year, the mother
of his illegitimate daughter. The poet was using sym-
bols, such as trees and daisies, whose glory he sang
when he meant he wished he had love. Some things can
be enjoyed alone, though not altogether, such as food,
plays, pictures, reading, music, lectures, etc. It is the
great distinction of nature that she inspires human love
and also provokes sadness.

Most of the old bucolic poets frankly associated their
Corydons and Amaryllises with enjo3mient of nature.
Wordsworth, who had much of the English Puritanism,
was reserved. Any reader who takes up the nature poetry
of Wordsworth lays it down after a while with the feel-
ing that the poet is not telling the whole truth. It does
not follow that Wordsworth was deliberately concealing
it, for he may have been unaware of what was in his
unconscious. After he married and had love he contin-
ued for a while to give us great nature poetry, for the
most part a reflection of his early mood. For it must
not be assumed that because a man has love he there-
fore loses his love for nature. Wordsworth's greatest
nature poem, "Lines on Tintern Abbey," was vmtten be-
fore his marriage; the nature poetry of the last thirty
or forty years of his life was rather poor.

The secret of Wordsworth's great nature poetry is
this: it was a sublimation of his unsatisfied love cravings
and a symbolic means of expressing them. Instead of
singing directly of his longing for love, or creating imag-
inary love scenes for himself, or voicing despair, as other
poets did, he expressed his passion for nature and thus
vented himself unconsciously of his feelings. True, the

i66 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

impulse of the vernal wood interested him because it
taught him much about moral evil and good; it made him
also think of love and he sang of his love indirectly by
praising that impulse.

This theory which seems so inevitable is one to which
we are forced from so many human experiences with
nature and yet critics have not dared to advance it. The
psychology of nature worship will no doubt be more
completely studied by psychoanalysts some day, and
we will understand our nature poets better. The in-
terpretation may offend those who want to persuade
themselves that nature has only sermons for us, but let
the reader take up some of the sensuous nature descrip-
tions in Keats and Spenser and he will realise more
clearly the underlying meaning of nature worship.

It is significant that much sexual sjTnbolism has
been found in two poets who were deemed most ret-
icent on the subject of sex — ^Wordsworth and Brown-
ing.

There is no better proof that common objects, when
possible, were formerly assigned sexual associations, than
the obscene riddles of the Exeter Book. This work is
largely attributed to the second great Engliish poet
Cynewulf in the eighth century. Certain riddles are
propounded which reek with lewd suggestions, and the
answer is supposed to be some object innocent in itself;
it is apparent, however, from the questions and descrip-
tions given that the interest in this object is because it
is sexually symbolical. Thus the answers meant for the
26th, 45th, 46th, ssth, 63rd and 64th riddles of the
Exeter Book are leek, key, dough, churn, poker and
beaker, respectively. The reader will note thus how

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 167

these objects had a sexual symbolic meaning for our
ancestors.

Professor Frederic Tupper in his scholarly work The
Riddles of the Exeter Book says: "By far the most
numerous of all riddles of lapsing or varying solutions
are those distinctly popular and unrefined problems
whose sole excuse for being (or lack of excuse) lies in
double meaning and coarse suggestion, and the reason
for this uncertainty of answer is at once apparent. The
formally stated solution is so overshadowed by the ob-
scene subject implictly presented in each limited motive
of the riddle, that little attention is paid to the aptness
of this. It is after all only a pretence, not the chief
concern of the jest." He quotes from another scholar,
Wossidlo, a number of other objects than those sug-
gested in the Exeter Book, which in other riddle books
were invested with sexual symbolism. These are spin-
ning wheel, kettle and pike, yarn and weaver, frying-
pan and hare, soot-pole, butcher, bosom, fish on the hook,
trunk-key, beer-keg, stocking, mower in grass, butter-
cask and bread-scoop.

Freud is apparently correct when he stated that famil-
iar objects of our day like umbrellas and machinery are
given a sexual significance by our dreams unconsciously.

That man early expressed his interest in love in sym-
bolical terms is conceded by most anthropologists and
philologists. They have traced the origins of many of
our customs and institutions, our words and figures of
rhetoric, to the veiled eroticism of former times. In our
speech are many terms which now have a distinct sexual
significance, though they originally had a symbolic one.
The word for seed in Hebrew is zera, the Latin word is
semen (from sero, to sow). Both words are also used
for spermatozoa. Man formerly sought analogies just

1 68 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

as he does to-day; he often feared to violate a taboo, or
aimed at a delicacy of expression. He saw the life pro-
ducing principle at work everywhere, and he found sym-
bols for it in the phenomena of nature, in the sun, moon,
water, forest, garden, field, trees, roses; in animals like
the serpent, the horse, the bull, the fish, the goat, the
-dove; in implements like the arrow, the sword, the
plough. Common objects assumed for him suggestive
meanings. He saw a means of coining new expressions
for generative acts and objects; he found associations
when he used the fire-drill drilling in the hollow of the
wood, or when he threw wood upon the fire. In later
time he coined new symbolical terms suggested by such
acts of his as stuffing a cork in a bottle, or putting bread
in the oven, or inserting a key in the lock.

Man speaks in symbolic language especially when it
comes to sex matters. This symbolism appears hence in
his dreams and his literature. The language of the un-
conscious is symbolic, and literature is often expressing
the author's unconscious in symbolic terms without his
being aware of this.

When poets celebrate the ceremonies about the May
pole they may not know that this celebration is related
to early phallic worship. When ^schylus wrote his
play of Prometheus stealing the fire, or Milton used the
Biblical material of Eve tempted by the serpent, they
were probably ignorant of the sexual associations of fire
and the serpent in ancient times. But their own works
thus become symbolical. Shelley, for example, used the
metaphor of the snake quite often, and one of the best
known passages in his works is the description of the
fight of the eagle and the serpent in The Revolt of
Islam. He often referred to himself also, as the snake.
Yet he may not have been aware there was an uncon-

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 169

scious connection between his interest in free love and
the symbol of the serpent.

The part played by symbolism in love poetry is seen
especially in The Song of Songs. To us moderns and
occidentals many of the comparisons and symbolical rep-
resentations seem very strange, but they had their ori-
gin not in the poet's own conceits but in a historic use
of the language. This most celebrated of all love poems
fairly swarms with sensuous symbolic images. It proves
that early man saw lascivious suggestions everjnvhere in
the landscapes, in flowers, rocks, trees, country, city, ani-
mals. The speech of our ancestors was sexualised.

The beloved in the poem, which is a dialogue between
her and her lover, is like a wall with towers (the
breasts) ; she is a vineyard ; she is in the clefts of the
rock and the hidden hollow of the cliff. She has eyes
like doves, her hair is like a flock of straying goats, her
teeth like a flock of washed ewes, her lips like a scarlet
thread, her temples like pomegranate, her neck like the
tower of David builded with turrets and hung with shields,
her breasts like twin fawns feeding among the lilies. She
is a dosed garden, a shut up spring, a sealed fountain.
The roundings of her thighs are like the link of a chain,
her navel is like a round empty goblet, her belly like a
heap of wheat set among lilies, her eyes like the pools of
Heshbon, her nose like the tower of Lebanon.

The lover is like an apple tree among the trees of
the wood; he is a young hart. His head is as fine gold,
his eyes are like doves, his cheeks are a bed of spices,
as a bank of sweet herbs; his lips are lilies dropping
myrrh, his hands are as rods of gold set with beryl, his
body is polished ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs
are pillars of marble set in sockets of gold; his aspect
like Lebanon, chosen like the cedar.

lyo' THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

The embrace of the lovers is described symbolically by
means of the tree symbol. It is known that the tree was
formerly used to represent both sexes. "The bisexual
symbolic character of the tree," says Jung in his Psy-
chology of the Unconscious (P. 248), "is intimated by
the fact that in Latin trees have a masculine termina-
tion and a feminine gender." The lover in the Song of
Songs calls his beloved a tree and says he will climb up
to the palm tree and take hold of the branches; his
beloved's breasts will be as clusters of the vine and the
smell of her countenance like apples.

Students of anthropology will recognise all the sex
symbols in this poem and will find analogies in other
literatures. This great love poem is regarded by many,
curiously enough, as a religious allegory. The chapter
headings in the King James version of the Bible represent
Christ and the Church as symbols of the lovers. Higher
criticism has recognised the fact that the poem is a love
poem. This is also proved by the fact that from time
immemorial it has been the practice of orthodox Hebrews
to read it on the Sabbath eve, which is the time for love
embrace among them.

VI

Psychoanalysis has gone far, indeed, in seeing sex
symbolism in many objects and ceremonies and alle-
gories where it was least expected to exist. Freud and
Jung, though they differ in their views here, see in many
symbols concealed incestuous wishes. They have dealt
with the subject in Totem and Taboo and The Phychol-
ogy of the Unconscious, respectively. I have no inten-
tion of going into the differences between their theories.

Artists in the mediaeval ages, who always drew and
painted the Virgin Mary, showed also unconsciously

SEXUAL SYMBOLISM 171

in a symbolic form the infantile incestuous wishes for
their own mothers. By this I simply imply that having
failed to find love in real life, they took shelter in their
love for their mothers. A modern critic has divined the
significance of the worship of the Virgin in so fine a
poet as Verlaine, who, while he embraced Catholicism,
was not a churchman in the strict acceptance of the
word. In his French Literary Studies, Professor T. B.
Rudmose-Brown says of Verlaine: "It is his intense need
of a love that will not return upon itself that makes
Verlaine turn to Christ's Virgin Mother — the Rosa Mys-
tica in whom he found all the qualities he looked for in
vain in his cruelly divine child-wife and his many
'amies' of later life — and crouch like a weary child be-
neath her wondrous mantle." Verlaine used the Virgin
as a symbolic emblem. He unconsciously craved for the
love of his mother since in later life he was divorced by
his wife.

The sjanbol then often becomes under our new science
the means of recovering the love one felt as a child for
one's own mother. The author may not be aware that
this use of the symbol is being made by him. He uses
the earth to-day, as man from time immemorial has used
it, as a symbol of the mother, when he exclaims he wants
to die and go back to mother earth.

The researches of scholars have established, then, the
connection between love and symbolic expressions there-
of, and it will be the task of future critics to discover
the author's unconscious expression of his love life by
symbols. Just as the horse shoe, the mandrake and the
four-leafed clover, which are signs of good luck among
superstitious people, were originally symbols of fruitful-
ness, so other objects described in books will be seen to
have a sexual origin through a study of anthropology.

CHAPTER XII

cannibalism: the atkeus legend

It will be probably a shock to many people to be told
that the cannibalistic instinct still is part of our uncon-
scious. It appears in that pathological state known as
lycanthropy where the patient often has a craving for
human flesh. It is occasionally revived in cases of starva-
tion and shipwreck, when men are driven to eat human
flesh. There should be nothing strange about this, for
we are descended from people who were cannibals. And
we know that men of the old stone age in France were
cannibals and it was practised in Greece in earliest times.
It has not yet been exterminated in parts of Africa and
Polynesia.

Cannibalism figured considerably in ancient literature.
It is not my purpose to go into the question of its ori-
gin, or the ceremonials connected with it. There are
good articles on the subject in the EncydopcBdia of Re-
ligion and Ethics by J. A. MacCuUouch and in the En-
cyclopxdia Britannica by Northcote W. Thomas. I shall,
however, touch on instances where men ate human flesh
at sacrifices.

Cannibalism to-day has chiefly a historic and a liter-
ary interest. The subject is worth taking up because of
the attention paid to it in literature. We have tales
about it to-day. Conrad has given us in his Folk a

172

CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND 173

story of cannibalism. Falk was the survivor on a
wrecked ship and was driven by hunger to feast on the
bodies of sailors, thus saving his life. The memory of
the event is of course horrible to him. The young lady
he loves marries him despite his experience.

One of Jack London's stories of cannibalism is "The
Whale Tooth" in his South Sea Tales. It tells how a
missionary who went out to convert some Fiji cannibals
was betrayed by Ra Vatu, a heathen about to embrace
Christianity. The savage desired the missionary's boots
to present to a chief. In spite of his acceptance of the
religion of Christ he was willing to have his bene-
factor made a victim of cannibalism. In the same story
London refers to a chief who ate eight hundred and
seventy-two bodies.

Cannibalism is to us but a curiosity that we once
practised. We find no injunction against cannibalism,
or eating one's children, among the crimes on the stat-
ute books. It is no crime under the Common Law. A
man who would commit cannibalism among us would
be sent to an insane institution. There are no laws
against a thing when no one has the least iiiclination
to do it. Society recognises that the instinct for canni-
balism is dead, but it is nevertheless in our unconscious.
Our psyche never forgets the episodes in the lives of our
ancestors.

The only places where there are laws against canni-
bahsm are in savage countries where there is a disposi-
tion to practise it; and these laws are made by colonists.

It is prevalent to-day in Africa. John H. Weeks in
Among Congo Cannibals (1913) tells us he saw savages
carrying dismembered parts of human bodies for a feasf
and that he was offered some cooked human food. He
also speaks of a white man who was a dealer in human

174 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

flesh to a tribe, an example of degradation that finds a
parallel in Kurtz's conduct in Conrad's story The Heart
of Darkness. Mr. Herbert Ward in his A Voice from
Congo (1910) describes how some human victims were
hawked to pieces, alive, for feasts; he witnessed or-
ganised traffic in human flesh and saw several cannibal
feasts.

n

Let us mark the part played by cannibalism in ancient
Greek literature. We will see that the cannibalistic in-
stinct was part of the psychic life of the earliest Greeks.
There was a reaction to it as there was to incest of the
son with the mother as shown in Sophocles's Oedipus.
Enforced cannibalism, where a man was made to eat his
own children unknowingly, is the revenge motive of the
famous Greek play — Agamemnon; this play depicts the
reaction to cannibalism.

In the Atreus legend which .^chylus used in Aga-
memnon, Thyestes eats the flesh of his children, offered
up to him by his brother Atreus, in revenge for having
seduced Atreus's wife. In expiation of Atreus's crime his
future descendants suffer. The unfortunate Thyestes
had a son, ^gisthus, as the offspring of the connection
with Atreus's wife — (Pelopia, Thyestes's own daughter,
by the way) . Atreus and his son Agamemnon were later
killed by ^gisthus, who had besides seduced Agamem-
non's wife Clytemnestra. Agamemnon's son, Orestes,
avenges the murder by killing his mother and her para-
mour. Orestes is shown as expiating his matricide in the
Oresteia trilogy of which Agamemnon is the first play.

In ^schylus's Agamemnon, we have the expiation of
the crime of Atreus for enforcing cannibalism on his
brother. There are several passages dealing with the

CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND 175

crime, ^gisthus describes in detail how his father
Thyestes ate the flesh of his own children and how he
vomited when he was told what he had done. When
Cassandra, who returns with Agamemnon, in her insane
ravings is telling of the punishment to befall Clytemnes-
tra she has a vision of the old feast of the children. The
Chorus also tells about the story.

All this shows the horror which was inspired by a deed,
the eating of one's children, and this must mean that
way back in antiquity this act was practised and that the
Greeks were now describing the act as revolting.

There are several other stories of enforced cannibalism
in ancient literature with revenge as the motive. Hero-
dotus tells us how the King of the Medes punished
Harpagus for not killing Cyrus by making Harpagus dine
on the flesh of his own son. This was in the sixth cen-
tury B. C. Tereus, King of the Thracians, was served
up his son by the latter's own mother, because Tereus
dishonoured his sister-in-law, Philomela, and deprived her
of her tongue. In one of Grimm's fairy tales. The Juni-
per Tree, we have the story of a man who is given the
flesh of his own child by his wife, the child's step-
mother.

Seneca in the first century A. D. wrote Thyestes, dra-
matising all the repulsive episodes, describing the pre-
paring of the children for the feast and the feast itself.
The most loathsome theme is made the main idea of the
story. Shakespeare has a scene in Titm Andronkus
where Titus makes the wicked Tamora eat the heads of
her two sons baked in a pie. Crebillon wrote a canni-
balistic play in the i8th century, Atree et Thyeste.

The tale of Saturn, who swallowed his children when
they were born so as not to be dethroned in accordance
with the prophecy, with the result that he was com-

176 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

pelled to disgorge them later by Zeus, has its parallels
in folk-lore among the Bushmen, Eskimos and others. It
is a very old story.

Freud saw in the (Edipus legend the horror reaction
of the Greeks to two legendary deeds, the killing of a
father and the marrying of the mother by the son, deeds
which had their basis in reality and which were occa-
sionally repeated in dreams. Similarly we can see in the
Atreus legend a reaction to the idea of eating one's
children, an act that used to accompany the offering
of human sacrifices. But we cannot say that the can-
nibalistic instinct affects one's future as the (Edipus
complex does. It is, however, part of our unconscious.
The effectiveness of Swift's famous satirical proposition
to help the poor in Ireland by suggesting that they sell
the flesh of their own children for food to the rich, is due
to the fact that children's flesh was actually once eaten.
Swift wrote his essay with ironical intent but he was
utilising an ancient historical fact, unknowingly.

We know from the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Jeph-
thah and his daughter, and Iphigenia, as well as from
historical records, that children were offered as human
sacrifices and that the body of the victim was often
eaten; hence there is a connection between human sacri-
fice and cannibalism.

J. A. MacCuUouch in his scholarly article on can-
nibalism in the Encyclopcsdia of Religion and Ethics,
ventures the opinion that human sacrifice rose through
an earlier cannibalism, on the principle that as men
liked human flesh the Gods would also relish it. The
worshippers later shared in the human feasts, with the
Gods. Westermarck says that the sacrificial form of
cannibalism springs from the idea that a victim of-
fered to a God participates in his sanctity and the wor-

CANNIBALISM: THE ATREUS LEGEND 177

shipper by eating the human flesh transfers to himself
something of the divine virtue.

There were many cases of orgastic cannibalism in an-
cient Greece. There is a vase showing a Thracian tear-
ing a child with his teeth in the presence of a god. Pau-
sanias relates that a child was torn and eaten in a sac-
rifice to the Gods in Bceotia. In Plato's Republic, VIII
566, we have an account of a survival of an earlier canni-
bal sacrificial feast. It is related there that a piece of
human flesh was placed among the animals sacrificed
to Zeus Lycaeus and that in the feasts that followed the
eater of the fragments became awere-wolf.

Other people like the Fijis who partook in a human
feast offered first part of the slain to the gods.

The custom of human sacrifices and cannibalism died
out among the Greeks, and in ^Eschylus's trilogy we
have the horror reaction of the educated Greek against
these institutions. The playwright shows the terrible
retaliation visited on the man who indulges in cannibalism
or makes another do so. Punishment for Atreus's deed
is visited upon his son, Agamemnon, in many ways, one
of which is being forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphige-
nia. Agamemnon is also punished by the infidelity of
his wife with ^gisthus, and by being murdered by them.

The tale of Iphigenia thus sheds some light on the
subject. She figures considerably in the Agamemnon.
iEschylus tells us that Clytemnestra felt justified for
being untrue to her husband Agamemnon because he
sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. The latter's name
is closely associated with human sacrifice in Greek legend.

In the Saturnalia of Rome a human victim was slain
as late, as the fourth century A. D.

The theory then resolves itself to this: In very an-

178 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

dent times before Greek civilisation made its appear-
ance children were sacriiiced to ward off evil and the
flesh of those children was eaten by the parents. There
rose a reaction to this which we see in the Atreus legend.

CHAPTER XIII

SOME PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM

\/' Psychoanalysis will put in a new light the old liter-
ary controversies between realism and idealism, be-
tween classicism and romanticism. Idealistic writers are
those who write of imaginary pleasing scenes and char-
acters. Their books are founded on the same principles
that are at the basis of dreams; these are the fulfilment
of the author's wishes. We grow weary of a deluge of
such literature, because it is too visionary and not re-
lated to reality. We prefer to see life as it is, even
though it is harsh. Hence our reaction to those ancient
types of romances where the heroes are always strong,
pursuing false ideals, obeying silly codes of honour, and
are always triumphant; we weary still more of the hero-
ines who are always without individuality. The most
idealistic books are those dealing with Utopias, and
though the new visionary societies are as a rule undesir-
able and impossible, they represent the wish of the
author fulfilled; such works sometimes, as in the
case of Plato's Republic and More's Utopia, are full of
valuable suggestions. Utopias, however, are generally
dreary because they make no allowances for our in-
stincts; the author is insincere to himself and pretends
to be what he is not.

179

i8o THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

Then there is the idealistic literature which builds a
dream palace beyond this life. The author wants to
live forever and to have things he did not possess here,
and he creates imaginary scenes where all that he suf-
fered here is righted. Of this type of literature is the
Paradise of Dante, and the Celestial City of Bunyan.
Literature of this type pleases many people, as it enables
them to get away from reality and to have a ground for
believing in the existence of chimeras they cherish.
Idealism in literature is the selection for description of

^ only those features of life that please the fancy of the
author. People are described not as they are but as the
author would like them to be; events are narrated not
as they occur in life but as the writer would wish them
to happen. The dream of the author is given instead of
an actual picture of reality. When Shakespeare grew
weary of London life, he drew a picture of life in the
forest of Arden in his ^J You Like It such as he would
have liked to have enjoyed. Idealistic literature hence
gives us an insight into the nature of the author's uncon-
scious. His constructed air castles show us where reality
has been harsh with him. It is true all literature must to
some extent be idealistic, as the author must always do
some selecting. Idealism will never die out in literature.
Man is an idealist by nature; every man who has day
dreams is reconstructing life in accordance with his de-
sires.

There is always a large element in the population that
hearkens back to its childhood days. Even our most in-
tellectual people like to divert liemselves with stories
of piracy, battles, sunken treasures, tales of the sea, of

. adventure and mystery. The people who love romance
go back in their reading to their boyhood days; they have
in their unconscious, primitive emotions that, unable to

LITERARY CRITICISM i8i

find an outlet to-day very well, refuse to remain alto-
gether repressed ; they get satisfaction by seeing pictures
of life in which the unconscious thus participates. The
perennial interest of Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Is-
^ land, of Scott and Dumas, of the sea stories of Cooper
and Captain Marryat, of the detective stories of Gabo-
riau and Doyle, is due to the fact that they make us
young again. It is true we often outgrow some of these
books and find them dull in later life, but they enchant
many of us at all ages because our inherent instincts
from savage and less cultivated people can only be kept
repressed by being given a feigned instead of a real satis-
p faction.

Old legends like those about Achilles, the Wandering
Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Charlemagne, and King Ar-
thur and his knights, never weary us; they continue to
furnish artists and writers with artistic material. Psy-
choanal3rsis explains the love we feel for these romances.
We have never quite grown out of either the barbar-
ous or boyish state. We like the strange, the mar-
vellous, the mysterious, for this was specially charac-
teristic of man in an early stage and of the boy. We
also find an affinity for the kind of life our ancestors leu.
We are interested in tales where men are hunting and
fighting. Man's unconscious loves a fight, for he has
always fought in the history of the race. He is fasci-
nated by danger and the idea of overcoming obstacles.
And he wants such scenes introduced in literature.

Psychoanalysis also explains the affinity that we have

for the supernatural in literature. Freud's disciples, like

. Rank and Abraham and Ricklin, have shown in The

y Myth of the Birth of the Hero, in Dreams and Myths,

^ and in Wishfulment and Fairy Tales, respectively, that

fairy tales are to be interpreted like dreams and represent

1 82 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the fulfilled wishes of early humanity. The child who
likes fairy tales finds his own wishes satisfied in these
tales dealing with the supernatural and improbable. Even
when great poets make use of the supernatural in their
work, the same principles of wish fulfilment are there.
Faust is saved in Goethe's poem, Prometheus is released
in Shelley's lyric drama and the Knight of the Cross
is victorious over the dragon in Spenser's allegory. The
poems give us the fulfilled wishes of the modern poets.
True the modem poet introduces advanced ideas of his
time and gives different interpretations to the old tales.
But we still love the supernatural because we have our
limitations with reality.

In an essay on Hans Christian Andersen published in
1867 George Brandes showed the connection between
the unconscious and the nursery tale. Thus he antici-
pated the discoveries of Abraham, Ricklin and Rank, who
noted that folk-lore and fairy tales are, like dreams,
realised wishes of the unconscious of early humanity,
formulated into endurable form. Brandes objected to
the occasional moral tag in Andersen's stories "because
the nursery story is the realm of the unconscious. Not
only are unconscious beings and objects the leaders of
speech in it, but what triumphs and is glorified in the
nursery story is this very element of unconsciousness.
And the nursery story is right, for the unconscious ele-
ment is our capital and the source of our strength."
Brandes shows how child psychology interests us all
because of its unconscious. He distinguished the changes
brought in by the nineteenth century where the uncon-
scious is worshipped, while in the critical eighteenth cen-
tury consciousness alone had been valued.

Nietzsche understood that the romantic life of our
ancestors and their ways of thinking were repeated by

LITERARY CRITICISM 183

us in our dreams. He wrote in his Human AH Too
Human, Vol. i, pp. 23-26: "The perfect distinctions of
all dreams — representations, which pre-suppose absolute
faith in their reality, recall the conditions that apper-
tain to primitive man, in whom hallucination was ex-
traordinarily frequent, and sometime simultaneously
seized entire communities, entire nations. Therefore, in
sleep and in dreams we once more carry out the task
of early humanity. ... I hold, that as man now still
reasons in dreams, so men reasoned also when awake
through thousands of years; the first cause which oc-
curred to the mind to explain anything that required an
explanation, was sufficient and stood for truth . . . this
ancient element in human nature still manifests itself
in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the
higher reason has developed and still develops in every
individual; the dream carries us back into the remote
conditions of human culture, and provides a ready means
of understanding them better. Dream-thinking is now
so easy to us because during immense periods of human
development we have been so well drilled in this form
of fantastic and cheap explanation, by means of the first
agreeable notions. In so far, dreaming is a recreation of
the brain, which by day has to satisfy the stern demands
of thought, as they are laid down by the higher culture."
Supernatural phenomena, however, in our contempo-
rary literature savour of imitation and the artificial.
Writers do not as a rule believe in the supernatural while
the creators of the old fairy tales did. From so fine a
poet as Yeats, who is said to believe in fairies, we get
literature that is both sincere and artistic. We have a
beautiful ideal reconstruction of the world in such a play
as The Land of Heart's Desire. Here the dream prin-
ciple is still at work.

i84 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

Among the fairy tales of our day are those centring
around psychic phenomena and reporting the conversa-
tions of the dead. They are written because they repre-
sent the writer's wishes to communicate with the dead
and to prove that we do not die. They are needed by
some in an era of exact science and a great war as
old folk lore was needed in its time. Needless to say
this does not speak well for the intellects of the writ-
ers of these spiritualistic works. We make something
occur because we want it to transpire. Lodge's Raymond
is one of the fairy tales of recent times and it has a
genuineness because the author, to the amazement of
many of us, believes those talks with his son actually
took place. The book is really a commentary on his
pathetic state of mind after the death of his son, and is
his dream of hope.

But realistic literature is after all in the ascendant, for
it tells us of what we experience in our own life. Don
Quixote showed us that love for books dealing with
dreams and impossibilities may help to make one mad.
Men are interested in their inner struggles and in the
problems of the day. Books treating of these have re-
placed considerably the old romances as serious litera-
ture.

Romantic and idealistic works are like dreams, frag-
ments of the psychic life of the race when it was young.

n

' The literary works that we like best are those which
tell of the frustration of wishes like our own. We prefer
to read about troubles like those we have suffered, to
lose ourselves in the dreams and fantasies built up by

LITERARY CRITICISM 185

authors, akin to those we have conjured up in our own
imagination.

We prefer a book that apologises for us, that tells of
strivings and repressions such as we have experienced.
We get a sort of pleasure then out of painful works, in
which our sorrows and wants are put into artistic form,
so as to evoke them again in us. It depends often on the
character of our repression as to the nature of the books
we like. If we have overthrown the authority of our
fathers or experienced a painful love repression because
we were hampered by social laws, if we have broken with
our religious friends or been crushed by some moneyed
powers, we may become of a revolutionary trend of mind
and hence prefer writers with radical opinions. In our
time there have arisen a number of geniuses who voiced
such opinions; having experienced repressions on account
of the customs of society, they sang and wrote of those
repressions and attacked those customs. The great love
felt by the young man who does not fit into the social
order, for writers like Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw,
and others, is because these writers approve an individual-
ism that he seeks to cultivate. He who is grieved by the
tyranny of the philistine and the bourgeois, the hypocrite
and the puritan, finds himself consoled by writers who
were also victims of such tyranny.

If we are somewhat more neurotic than the average
person, or even abnormal, we go to the writers who are
neurotic and abnormal. Why did Baudelaire love Poe
so much? Because he saw in him another Baudelaire, a
dreamer out of accord with reality, a victim of drink and
drugs, a sufferer at the hands of women, an artist loving
beauty and refusing to be a reformer. Hence he trans-
lated Poe's works, swore to read him daily, and imi-
tated him. Baudelaire's unconscious recognised a brother

i86 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

sufferer in Poe; he wanted to have the same ideal condi-
tions Poe imagined in his dreams; he suffered from the
same neuroses that Poe suffered. These two writers be-
came the idols of the French decadent writers, and Huys-
mans, Mallarme and others loved them. The French
decadents found affinities with ancient authors, especially
the Roman poets of the Silver Age, Petronius and Apu-
leius. Oscar Wilde, Dowson and Arthur Symons in our
literature belong to the group who found themselves in
harmony with the French decadents.

Literary influences are due to definite reasons and fol-
low regular laws. Though sometimes authors appeal to
us who are just the opposite of ourselves, we, as a rule,
love those writers who write of our own unconscious
wishes.

What is the secret of the universal appeal of Hamlet?
Is it not because many of us, like him, have been in con-
flict wherein we could not act because there was an ex-
ternal obstacle? Dr. Ernest Jones found a reason for
Hamlet's inability to act in an unconscious feeling of
guilty love for his mother. He was jealous of his uncle,
the murderer of his father, and also the successful rival
to Hamlet in his mother's affections. This psychoanaly-
tic interpretation made by Dr. Ernest Jones adds a new
element to the old theory of Hamlet's struggle with fate.
Hamlet has given rise to a series of characters in litera-
ture characterised by inaction, by thinking and not doing.
Russian literature, with its Rudins and Oblomovs, has
recognised in this portrayal by Shakespeare a common
Russian type. Hamlet, nevertheless, had good reason
for not being able to act, and finally did act, though he
made a bungle of it all.

Byron and Shelley have had more imitators and lovers
than any of the poets of England of their time. We know

LITERARY CRITICISM 187

the influence of each of them on Tennyson and Browning
respectively, though the Victorians later departed from
the footsteps of their masters and became conservative.
But the causes that made Heine, Leonardi, De Musset
and Pushkin love Byron were the same as those which
drew to Shelley, the republican melodist Swinburne,
James Thomson, the atheist author of the City of Dread-
ful Night, Francis Thompson, the Catholic maker of
beautiful forms out of his own sufferings, and the un-
happy lyricist Beddoes, who committed suicide. The
later poets found Byron and Shelley singers of uncon-
scious wishes of their own, portrayers of moods and sor-
rows like those they felt and constructors of means of
ridding the world of such griefs by plans they largely
approved.

The reason for the universal appeal of the Bible is
because of the variety in this library of books; there is
always some chapter that expresses our unconscious
wishes.

The Old Testament, especially, satisfies our uncon-
scious. This is due to the psalms voicing human sorrow,
and the prophecies of Isaiah ringing with a passionate
love for justice, to the pleasant tales that appeal to our
youthful fancy like those of Joseph and his brethren,
and Ruth, and the philosophical drama of Job, in whose
sufferings we see our own, to the epicureanism and mel-
ancholy in Ecclesiasticus, and the military exploits of
Joshua and David. The Bible appeals as literature to
many who do not believe in dogma or miracles, to many
who find parts of it cruel and unjust because it is a va-
ried collection of books, and, as a result, the unconscious
wishes and means of gratification of some of the writers
must meet our own, separated as we are from them by
thousands of years.

i88 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

When we read that Wordsworth soothed De Quincey
and John Stuart Mill, and had a tonic effect on Arnold,
so that he became a leading disciple, that Shaw based
his wit and philosophy on Samuel Butler, an almost for-
gotten contemporary, that Brandes found an affinity in
writers like Shakespeare and Ibsen, we are aware that ,
the process is the same: the later author found somev
earlier one who especially expressed his unconscious
wishes.

Take the literary influences in literature, that of
SmoUet on Dickens, that of Dickens on Daudet and Dos-
toievsky and Bret Harte, that of Balzac on Flaubert, of
Flaubert on Maupassant and Zola, of Carlyle on Ruskin
and Froude, of Kipling on Jack London. All this means
that the author influenced found in his master a kindred
sufferer and a kindred dreamer.

Literature gives each writer or reader the means of
choosing his own father as it were. When a man says
he found his whole life changed by a certain book, it is /
equivalent to his saying that the book has merely madev
him recognise his unconscious; it did not put anything
there that was not there before. The book had a psy-
choanalytic effect on him; it taught him to look at his
unconscious objectively; it brought to consciousness
something that was repressed. If the resistance to per-
ceiving that unconscious had not been overcome the
book could have had no effect. We hate a book often
because the censorship in us is too great. When John
A. Ssononds describes the effects of Whitman's Leaves of
Grass, which he says influenced him more than any other
book except the Bible, he meant Whitman cured him of
neurosis, brought out his repressed feelings and made
him aware of his inner wants and told him how to satisfy
them.

LITERARY CRITICISM 189

•^ j^ The saying, "Tell me what you read and I'll tell you
what you are," is true. People differ about the qualities
of books because their own unconscious wishes have been
met differently in these books.

in

What then is the cause of literary movements and what
stamps the peculiarities of a literary age, if all writers
draw on their unconscious? Why does a Pope appear in
the age of Queen Anne and a Wordsworth at the end of
the reign of George IV? Why didn't Shakespeare write
in the Elizabethan age like Charles Dickens in the Vic-
torian period? How account for the warlike character
of the Saxon epic Beowulf, for the religious tone of her
first poet, Caedmon ; for the interest in chivalry and alle-
gory in Uie Faerie Queen? What made Bunyan so ab-
sorbed in salvation, in Pilgrim's Progress, at the
time the Restoration dramatists were steeped in ex-
hibitionism and immorality? What are the causes of the
notes of moral revolt in Byron and Shelley, of the roman-
ticism of Scott, the realism of George Eliot? If the un-
conscious is alike in all people, and genius records the
ideas and emotions formed by personal repressions, it
would seem the works of all geniuses who have had simi-
lar repressions should be alike, irrespective of the ages in
which they lived.

Literary historians and philosophers have accounted
for the various changes in literary taste fairly satisfac-
torily, although they have often omitted from their in-
vestigations the factor of the personal experiences and
idiosyncrasies of the author, and have emphasised too
strongly the importance of the predominant ideas of the
age. Yet no author starts out to express the spirit of his

190 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

age. He gives vent to his unconscious which he sup-
presses more or less, and colours, in accordance with the
literary fashion prevailing. His unconscious appears in
a background of the literary machinery and ideas of the
time. Since in our unconscious are present all the
emotions man has had, different events may make any
of them burst forth.

On account of the recent war, many dormant emotions
were reanimated in us and appeared in our literature.
People found that Homer's Iliad and other ancient war-
like epics appealed to them more than these did in times
of peace. Literature in war times becomes more related
to primitive literature where the hero is the successful,
brave warrior. The military and patriotic spirit had not
been extinct, but quiescent.

If Milton had lived in the eighteen nineties he would
probably have written problem plays and novels instead
of Paradise Lost. He was unhappily married, but the
fashion of his age was not to create imaginative works
based on justifiable causes for seeking a divorce. He did
write on the subject of divorce, however, and his views
horrified his contemporaries. He stood alone. Had the
tendencies of the time been to make works of the imag-
ination out of situations in which he was personally
placed, he would have no doubt done so. In his uncon-
scious he felt about women and divorce much as Strind-
berg did. He retained during the Restoration his early
Puritanism and religious interests, and hence published
Paradise Lost. Even here he found an opportunity
for expressing special views about women and describing
his own forlorn condition.

Again it is likely that Shakespeare in our generation
would not have written much differently from Ibsen or
Hauptmann. The marriage problem interested him also,

LITERARY CRITICISM 191

for he was unhappily married and loved another. He
expressed his bitterness towards woman in his sonnets,
in his characterisations of historical characters like Cleo-
patra and Cressida. But he wrote no special work occu-
pied with the theme of the hard restrictions placed by so-
ciety upon the lives of some unhappily married people.
A work of this kind would have been almost a monstrosity
in his age. Shakespeare could not have written exactly
as Ibsen did, for though in their unconscious they were
alike, each had different traditions and backgrounds to
work on. No writer ignores totally prevailing literary
fashions or tastes.

It is not my purpose to go into the causes of changes
in tastes, traditions, ideas, movements. That subject has
been dealt with often. Economic reasons are great factors
in developing new literary periods and movements, yet
also have much to do with this feeling of reaction against
a preceding age. The artificiality of the eighteenth cen-
tury gave way to the love of nature of the nineteenth.
The demand for reason, wit and classicism in literature
disappeared gradually, to be replaced by imagination, the
utilisation of emotion and romanticism. Wordsworth is a
reaction to Pope (even though Wordsworth's nature wor-
ship concealed his sex interest). His way was prepared
by other writers of nature like Thomson, Collins, Gold-
smith, Gray, Cowper, Crabbe, Blake and Bums. The
immorality and exhibitionism of Congreve, Wycherly,
Farquar, Van Brugh and Dryden in the Restoration
period were a reaction to the Puritanism of the age of
Cromwell. Bunyan, because of his early training and
physical and mental condition, however, still clung to
his early puritanism.

Yet Pope and Wordsworth were each men of their ages
and wrote in accordance with the rising literary traditions

192 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

of the time, though they also altered these. For the imita-
tive instinct is powerful and present in the most original
writers. Shakespeare's plays are much like those of Mar-
lowe and Fletcher, though greater. His "plagiarisms,"
like those of Milton, were extensive. It is true that often
one man sets the standard for a literary age, but he
usually has predecessors. His influence is due to the fact
that he strikes responsive chords in the unconscious of
many people of his time, and the circle of his admirers
and imitators increases, so as to make him an authority.

The realistic novels of George Eliot appeared after
England wearied of the fanciful fictions of Walter Scott.
A generation passed by before the reaction set in with
full force. Both writers wrote as they did, largely in
obedience to the tendencies of their times, upon which
they reacted and were reacted upon. They wrote be-
cause of personal repressions. Their methods of expres-
sion were different, because of a desire to comply some-
what with literary traditions. Romanticism was fashion-
able in 1830, while realism was in the air in i860.

Those readers who think that these views do not give
sufficient credit to writers for originality in Hterary
expression should remember that common literary forms
are followed by writers who may nevertheless be original
in ideas. Only the student of literary history realises the
power of literary imitation.

Take the thousands of pastorals that flooded European
literature from Theocrities to Pope; most of them, ex-
cept Spenser's Astrophel, Milton's Lycidas, and a few
others were flat and unprofitable. Note the numerous
sonnets written since the form was brought over from
Italy by Wyatt and Surrey. The extensive use of the
sonnet proves poets are imitative.

Recall the allegories with which mediaeval literature

LITERARY CRITICISM 193

abounded. Even the great short stories of Hawthorne,
who was much influenced by Bunyan and Spenser,
show traces of mediseval forms. Literary tradition is
certainly stronger than originality. And the thousands
of authors of our day who write novels and short stories,
would in mediaeval times have written allegories.

The ideas and mode of expression change, and hence
makes much of the old literature obsolete. But many
emotions remain eternal. We can still feel with Sappho
and the Troubadours, whereas we find our intellect in-
sulted by some of the religious ideas versified by Dante
and Milton; although the passages describing secular
emotions win our admiration.

When we must look for an author's unconscious buried
in the literary trappings of his day we weary of the task
and dismiss his work. Why can we not read the thou-
sands of pastorals and allegories of the mediaeval
writers? Is it not largely because of the feeble intellects,
and spirit of imitation present, because of the absence
of the personal note? The unconscious is buried too
deeply in rigmarole. The works have a psychological and
historical but not artistic value. The religious and
romantic instincts in many of us are buried too deeply in
our unconscious, and hence we do not sympathise with
those works.

Those poets live who have been most personal. The
Roman poets, Horace, Catullus, Titullus, Propertius,
Ovid, Lucretius, were personal. Even the Mneid reveals
the soul of Virgil in the story of ^neas and Dido.
^- The unconscious is present in all literature, and the lit-
erary movement but colours it and gives occasion for the
expression or censorship of certain phases of it. Puritan
writers are not in their unconscious any different from the
"immoral" ones; only the latter relax the censor and ^ve

194 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

full play to the unconscious, when a liberal age like that
of the Restoration or the Renaissance, permits it.
(/ Hence, though all writers draw on their unconscious
and base their work on their personal repressions, authors
of one age differ in manner and substance from those of
another, not because the unconscious is different (which
it is not), but because it is fashionable to express only
certain features of it in one age; because writers have an
instinctive tendency to comply with the literary fashions
of their age; because the time spirit colours and censors
those elements of the unconscious which appear in the
literary product.

IV

Freud has shown in his Psychopathoiogy of Every-
Day Life that we tend to forget the things that are
displeasing to us, that unconsciously we avoid what has
once caused us pain. The objection has been raised to
this theory that as a matter of fact it is the painful things
that we never forget, and that these impress themselves
most on us. Such critics might have taken it for granted
that the scientist who laid down the principles that the
neuroses date from the earliest painful love experiences
which are never forgotten, but merely repressed and un-
conscious, would not have overlooked their objections.
Certainly we do not forget painful things, but nature has
so provided that we have a tendency to repress into our
unconscious annoying events and go on our way as if
they had never happened; only in symptomatic acts, mis-
takes, slips of the tongue and otherwise do we betray our-
selves. The man whose wife has lied never forgets it if
he has loved her. But if he has, let us say, been slighted
by a person who has not been playing a principal part in

LITERARY CRITICISM 195

his life, he will go on living as if that person had never
existed for him. He may unconsciously avoid the street
where that man lives, and forget about him, until some
occasion may arise when he may betray his dislike of that
person in a manner he never intended; the action is,
nevertheless, the voice of his unconscious. Life would
be unbearable if we always had before us pictures of our
past sufferings. In fact, a neurosis is brought about by
the fact that we don't forget. As Freud said, the hysteric
suffers from reminiscences or fantasies based on painful
events in the past.

The principle of unconscious avoiding of the painful is
at the basis of the rejection of the world's great books,
both old and new. Literary criticism is influenced by
our tendency to ignore what causes us pain.

The world has not always realised the reason for the
opposition to a new great thinker, or an advanced idea or
book. We have contented ourselves by asserting that the
world was not yet advanced enough intellectually to per-
ceive their greatness. We know, however, that often the
most intellectual people of an age are the first to reject
a new idea. Men like Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield
would have nothing to do with the theory of evolution.
Darwin's chief opponents were among the leading biolo-
gists of the time.

The fact of one's being born in an earlier generation
from the man who propounds the new idea, is a large fac-
tor in the rejection of it. Another unconscious reason for
the repudiation of the new idea is that it would cause us
pain if it were true. We would also feel that we had been
dupes all our lives. We had been smugly following a
pleasant delusion that brought us some happiness and
suddenly we see our bubble pricked. We had been fol-
lowing a course of thinking and conduct, that is now im-

196 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

peached by the new discovery. If a man has written
several books on miracles, original sin, and other dogmas.
in which he believes, and has spent all his life studying
the subjects, he could not accept a book which rejects his
ideas; it would mean that he had wasted his life. His
aversion to concur with the conclusions of that new book
is nature's means of preventing him from suffering great
pain; it is a defence action. If a preacher has advised
thousands of couples who were unhappy not to divorce
and not to remarry some one with whom they might have
been happy, he would be the last man to see the great-
ness of a work that shows divorce may be a humane
and beneficial act in some cases, for it would mean that
he would have to admit he has ruined the lives of many
people.

The real objection by man to the Copemican theory
was that it reflected on his religion and his vanity; it was
annoying to hear that the earth was not the centre of
the universe. The Darwinian theory was a still more
painful discovery because it placed man among the de-
scendants of animals and taught that he was a by-product
like them. The facts, however, in both cases, were so
overwhelming that many managed to accept them and
still keep their religious beliefs intact, for these still give
consolation. In spite of Copernicus and Darwin, we stilt
live as if the world were the centre of the universe and
man its most divine product.

The most personal and human argument in favour of a
belief in personal immortality of the soul, of communion
with the dead or a Providential Personal God, is that life
would be sad if these theories were not true; they must
hence be true. Tennyson, in his In Memoriam, has the
popular attitude. If life didn't live for ever more, then
"earth is darkness at the core and dust and ashes all

LITERARY CRITICISM 197

that is." But our wishes must recede before logic and
facts.

A great idea, then, is not accepted if its conclusions are
painful to us when a more pleasant idea has prevailed;
every idea is rejected when its possible truth would mean
that we have been living in error and wasting our lives.
New ideas are nearly always made to fit in with the old
views.

The theory of evolution became acceptable only when
it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of the religionists
what at first did not seem apparent to them, that it in-
terfered neither with a belief in a personal God, Chris-
tianity nor the immortality of the soul.

Literary men who are advanced are admired often for
qualities that do not constitute their real greatness. The
conservatives praise the daring poet for his style, after
he has made his way; or they select a few of the minor
ideas he champions and ignore the greater ones. They
will not accept the Hardy who wrote Jude the Obscure,
but the Hardy of Far From the Maddening Crowd; they
will admire the early harmless lyrics of John Davidson
instead of the profound testaments and later plays, whose
real greatness was shown by Dr. Hayim Fineman in his
monograph on John Davidson.* They praise Swinburne
for his melody, Ibsen for his technique and Shaw for his
wit, but can see no intellectual value either in the Songs
Before Sunrise, or Peer Gynt, or Man and Superman.
They overlook the value of Byron's Don Juan or Cain,
because these works contain ideas that hurt most, and in-
stead they lavish compliments on harmless descriptions
like the address to the ocean, or the account of the battle
of Waterloo. They like Shelley's lyrics and see nothing
in his ideas.

* Published by the University of Pennsylvania.

198 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

The "conspiracy of silence" that has often greeted
many great men was at times unconscious. People are
not prone by nature to investigate something which might
bring painful results. They prefer to let it alone alto-
gether. The motive of ignoring a great book is founded
on one of displeasure. Hence morbid and pessimistic
books, revolutionary ideas, iconoclastic views on reli-
gion, morals or philosophy, new discoveries in science,
encounter opposition. We do not want to be disturbed
in our complacency. For the disturbance is, after all,
made by those who do not fit into the old order; their
own discoveries are defence processes. But gradually it
is seen that these writers express universal wants.

The opposition met by all investigations in the subject
of sex, is an example of man's effort to thrust painful
things out of sight. The barrier raised against Freud
himself rises largely from three leading ideas of his, those
on the sexual significance of symbols in dreams and the
attributing of neurosis to sexual causes, and the theory
that the infant has a sexual life of its own. In spite of
his broad use of the term sexual and his many demonstra-
tions of the truth of these ideas, man does not want to
believe them. Jung and Adler, who lay little stress on the
sexual element, have made the theory of psychoanalysis
acceptable to many; but Freud objects to the use of the
word psychoanalysis by disciples who have taken out of
his theory something he considers essential.

CHAPTER XIV

KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS

Stress has never been laid on the real unconscious
origins of some of Keats's best poems. We know that his
sad love affair with Fanny Brawne, who coquetted with
him, inspired a few poems directly addressed to her; it
is also indisputable that Keats had her in mind when
he wrote La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he was telling of
his own fate in the account of the knight's mishap. But
it is rarely recognised that emotions connected with
Fanny Brawne inspired his two most famous odes, the
one to the Nightingale and the other to the Grecian urn;
that the tale of Lamia, which ranks among his best poems,
is a symbolic description of his attitude towards Miss
Brawne, and that her presence is felt in other poems
and sonnets by Keats. He thought of her constantly,
and he could scarcely write a love poem but she some-
how or other stepped into the pages. When we compare
these and other poems to the letters that he had written
to her about the same time, we will find that often the
same emotions inspired both.

Keats met Miss Brawne in the fall of 1818, when he
was twenty-three years old. He quarrelled with her in
February, 1819, but, nevertheless, was her declared lover
in the spring. His first love letter that we have to her is
dated July i, 1819, and the last about May, 1820. In
- 199

200 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the spring and summer of 1819 he wrote some of his best
poems, and he showed most emphatically the repression
of his emotions by the coquetries of Fanny. He took a
walk among the marbles of the British Museum, in Feb-
ruary, 18 19, and three months later penned his Ode to
a Grecian Urn. In the latter part of April he heard
the nightingale in Brown's garden, and he wrote the
famous ode. In the same month he also wrote La Belle
Dame Sans Merci. In August and September of 18 19
he worked on Lamia. He had his first hemorrhage in
February, 1820, left England in September, and died in
Italy February, 182 1.

Those who have read the letters to Fanny will remem-
ber with what anxiety the poet wrote, how he showed his
jealousy and complained and pleaded without pride. In
one letter dated June 19, 1819, he said he would resent
having his heart made a football, that Brown, with whom
she flirted, was doing him to death by inches, and that the
air of a room from which Fanny was absent was un-
healthy to him. "I appeal to you by the blood of that
Christ you believe in. . . . Do not write to me if you
have done anything this month which it would have
pained me to have seen." In October he writes, "Love
is my religion — I could die for that; I could die for you."
The letters are the record of the agony of a man who is
being played with and who cries out in helplessness. He
cannot bear seeing her smiling with others or dancing
with them. Miss Brawne asserted after his death that
she did not regard him as a great poet, and thought it
advisable for people to let his reputation die. It is also
said she referred to him as the foolish poet who loved her.

Let us see how this sad affair influenced his work.

The Keats of the first volume. Poems, 1817, is a much
different person from the Keats of the Lamia volume, in

KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 201

1820. The three intervening years had brought a mad-
dening love affair, a fatal disease and the famous, though
not as once thought fatal review, attacking Endymion.
His art principles remained much the same. With grow-
ing sorrow he worshipped beauty more and sought in it
a refuge from grief. His attitude towards women and life
was now somewhat different. He paid woman a tribute
in the poem in the first volume, beginning with the lines,
"Woman! I behold thee," etc. But he had not yet suf-
fered from a Fanny Brawne; here he spoke of woman's
being "like a milk-white lamb that bleats for man's pro-
tection." And yet before he was twenty he may have had
a foreboding that his fate in love might not be a happy
one. In the poem, To Hope, he wrote:

"Should e'er unhappy love my bosom pain,
From cruel parents or relentless fair;
O let me not think it is quite in vain
To ' sigh out sonnets to the midnight air."

Alas for himself, but perhaps (it may be cruel to say)
fortunately for the lovers of literature, those sonnets and
other poems were sighed out later!

Before we can, however, quite understand his sad life
and the nature of his work and philosophy, something
must be said about his relations to his mother. She died
from consumption when he was past fourteen. Keats,
who was her favourite child, sat up nights, mourn-
ing her, and was inconsolable; he would hide for
days under his master's desk. Once, at the
age of five, he guarded her sick room with
a sword. His mother re-married a year after her
husband's death, when the poet was in his tenth year.
She separated from her second husband and went to live
with her mother. Keats then had a guardian. The poet

202 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

was the oldest of five children, and was a seven months'
child. All this is significant. The (Edipus Complex was
strong in the poet. He was not only deprived of his
mother early, but witnessed her marry a second time.
This event revived the babyish jealousy he felt of his
father, and made him unconsciously hate the new husband.
He looked for a substitute for the lost mother and thought
he found her in Fanny Brawne, and then be learned what
grief was. He loved beauty so much because of unre-
quited love. Some poets, like Wordsworth, seek conso-
lation in nature for lack of love, others like Byron simply
voice their woe in a personal note, others like Shelley
find it a spur to spread views of reform in connection
with the marriage institution. Keats's love of beauty
has a strong sexual component. His unfulfilled physical
desires were sublimated into poems worshipping beauty.
Art was his refuge.

We are now prepared to trace the origins of some of his
work. Most critics saw the unconscious allusions in the
La Belle Dame poem. It is symbolic of himself in
the snares of a coquette. There is an allusion to an old
song entitled La Belle Dame Sans Merci in Keats's
The Eve of St. Agnes which Porphjro played to Made-
hne while she slept; it was a poem composed in Pro-
vence; and we all know that most of the love poems of
the Provencal Troubadours were complaints about unre-
quited love. Keats's poem has a simple plot. A knight
tells the poet, in response to a question as to why he
was so woe-begone, that he met a fairy child and set her
on his pacing steed. She claimed to love him, and she
lulled him to sleep and he dreamed that pale kings and
princes and warriors told him that he was in the thrall
of a girl without mercy. They were evidently also her

KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 203

victims. He wakes and loiters on the cold hill side,
realising that he was her victim.

This poem was written within a few months before
the letter to Fanny was penned, in which he said he re-
sented having his heart made a football. The poem cor-
responds to an anxiety dream. Freud tells us that ttie
contents of the anxiety dream is of a sexual nature; the
libido has been turned away from its object, and, not
having succeeded in being applied, has been transformed
into fear. This poem is a good proof of this one of the
least-understood theories of Freud. Keats then is the
knight and Fanny is the fairy child.

The nature of his day dreams and jealousy appears in
the Ode to Fanny, a posthumous poem, probably not
meant for publication. It contains some of the sub-
stance of his letters to Fanny. He imagines he is watch-
ing Fanny at a dance, and jealous thoughts come to him.
"Who now with greedy looks eats up my feast?" he asks.
His only remedy is to write poetry to ease his pain. He
says to Physician Nature, "O, ease my heart of verse and
let me rest." He loves her so much he cannot bear that
any one profane her with looks. He wants her wholly,
her thoughts and emotions. The poem was probably
written about the time of the quarrel, in February, i8ig.

Another posthumous poem addressed to Fanny is the
one beginning with the lines, "What can I do to drive
away remembrance from my eyes?" He is now wishing
he were free from love, and that he had his old liberty.
He wants to devote himself to his muse as freely as he
once did. He thinks of wine as he did in the nightingale
poem, and asks: "Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgar-
ism." He is in hell, he realises, but he concludes with a
wish to satisfy his physical love for Fanny. He wants
to rest his soul on her dazzling breast, to place his arm

204 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

about her waist, and feel her warm breath spread a rapture
in his hair. In a posthumously published sonnet he
pleads, "I cry to you for mercy"; he wants her entirely,
including "that warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured
breast." In the sonnet he wrote (not before his death, as
usually thought but as Colvin says, in February, 1819),
in a blank page in a volume of Shakespeare facing "A
Lover's Complaint," "Bright star, would I were stead-
fast as thou art," he concludes most sensuously. He
longs to be:

"Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast.
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live forever — or else swoon to death."

All this shows that Keats's love was not one where
the reason or moral sense played a great part; it was not
tender or kindly, but a madness, and more than usually
physical. There can be no doubt, from the evidence given
by Keats, that he indulged in reveries of physical satis-
faction with Fanny in day dreams.

Keats has himself written that he had sensuous night
dreams. He wrote in April, 1819, apropos the sonnet,
A Dream, after reading Dante's Episode of Paolo and
Francesca: "The dream was one of the most delightful
enjo3mients I had in my life. I floated about the wheel-
ing atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure,
to whose lips mine were joined, it seemed for an age;
and in the midst of all this cold and darkness I was
warm." A flying dream always has a sexual significance,
even without any female figure to accompany the
dreamer. Of course this figure was Fanny Brawne to
whom he had just been or was about to be betrothed.

KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 205

n

We now come to his two greatest odes, the one to the
Grecian Urn and the other to the Nightingale. Both
were written in the spring of 1819. In both Fanny
Brawne is with the poet though there is no direct mention
of his love for her or his troubles with her. The lines
in the Ode to a Grecian Urn that particularly were writ-
ten with Fanny in mind are those addressed to the lover
of the Grecian Urn.

"Bold Lover, never, never, canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal — yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."

Keats saw a resemblance between himself and that
youth. He, too, was winning and near the goal, and he
no more had her love than did the youth on the urn.
He himself knew the passion

"That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead and a parching tongue."

He had to accept his lot and pretend to see some ad-
vantage in it as he did in that of the youth on the urn:

"More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young."

The poem is the song of unsatisfied desires. Keats,
frustrated in his love, had one resource, to make poetry
and create beauty out of his sorrow. To the future he
too would be like that lover created by an ancient artist,
panting for love ever young. The poem has such great
appeal because it strikes a note in us all.

?o6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

In the Ode to the Nightingale we also see evidence
of his love sadness because of Fanny. He expresses a
wish to go away with the bird from scenes

"Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.''

The nightingale has not known like him

"The weariness, the fever and the fret
Here where men sit and hear each other groan.''

Miss Brawne had embittered his life and hence he must
fly at least in fancy through poetry with the bird. Again
he finds consolation for his unhappy love in poetry.

He has been half in love with death, he has thought of
taking to drink; he expressed both these ideas in previous
poems. He is reminded that the nightingale's song was
heard by Ruth, because love is uppermost in his mind.
But he knows his fancied flight with the bird must end
shortly. He will soon come back to his real self with
the vexing thoughts of Fanny.

"Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceivmg elf."

Then the music ceased, and he is back on earth again.

The unconscious sex symbolism in the wish to fly with
the nightingale is a further proof of his unsatisfied love.

The motive of both these great poems was then sup-
plied by his unsatisfactory love affair, but critics have
not openly asserted the fact. It wasn't a mere walk in
the British Museum or in Brown's garden that gave birth
to the poems. These events merely incited him to put
on paper the poems which had already for some time
past fermented in his unconscious and were really pro-
duced by his repressed love for Fanny. Had he been

KEATS'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 207

happy in love, it is very likely we would never have had
these poems. They are as personal as the poems previ-
ously mentioned addressed directly to Fanny, as La
Belle Dame, and the sonnet written in the fly leaf of
Shakespeare. The same unhappy longings gave rise to
them all, and they were all written within a few months
of each other, though I have no evidence as to the date of
the sonnet and the lines to Fanny.

But it is in a long poem where Fanny is chiefly pres-
ent unconsciously, in Lamia. We have here the tale of
Lamia, a beautiful woman, who is a metamorphosed
serpent ensnaring Lycius of Corinth by her beauty.
Fanny is Lamia the serpent woman, Lycius of Corinth is
Keats himself. Lycius is about to marry Lamia, as
Keats was also thinking of marrying Fanny. It should,
by the way, be borne in mind that the period of the
writing of Lamia corresponds with the date of the first
published despairing letters of Keats to Fanny, the
summer and fall of 1819. It would be a rare miracle if
during this time he could have kept thoughts of his
sweetheart out of his work. Unconsciously he felt she
acted like a serpent, and hence he drew her as such.

Lycius did not want his teacher Apollonius, the philos-
opher, at the feast. But the preceptor did come, an un-
bidden guest, and told Lycius who this beautiful woman
really was. Lycius died of disappointment. Keats did
not wish to be told the truth about Fanny's lack of char-
acter, and thus be disillusioned. He felt that he too
would die, hence he fears facts and asks: "Do not
all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy?" In
this question we see already he suspects the nature of
Fanny. But he will not believe his uncertain suspicions
nor investigate them. It is the voice of his own uncon-
scious that he hears in these words of his preceptor:

2o8 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

" 'Fool ! Fool !' repeated he, while his eyes still
Relented not, nor moved; 'from every ill
In life have I preserved thee to this day,
And shall I see thee made a serpent's prey?'"

He attacks Fanny in his description of Lamia's plead-
ing, whose beauty smote while it guaranteed to save.
He tells of the meshes in which he struggled. That he
published the poem in his lifetime is evidence that he
himself was not altogether aware he was analysing his
own love affair and was abusing his fiancee. When he
resolved to make a poem of the little tale he read in
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy it was his unconscious
that chose the theme for him, recognising that he had
many affinities in his life with that of the unfortunate
Corinthian youth. The poem contains more of himself
than any of his long poems.

There are many other poems of Keats where the per-
sonal element enters and where he tells us of his un-
conscious. The affair with Fanny coloured his entire
work after he met her. He also knew and admired an-
other girl about the time he met Fanny, whom he calls
a Charmian ; she was a Miss Cox, but she did not greatly
influence him. It is to the intense affection Keats had
for his mother, of whom he was deprived in boyhood, and
the unfortunate affair with Fanny, that we owe some of
his best literary work.

CHAPTER XV

Shelley's personal love poems

Shelley's great love poems were inspired by love re-
pressions, and it will be my province to try to trace some
of the finest poems in the English language to their
sources.

His relations with women have been much criticised
and also much misunderstood. The first thing unusual
about his life is the slight influence his mother exerted
upon him. Shelley, no doubt, loved his mother, but he re-
ceived very little sympathy from her. As a result he be-
came strongly attached to his sisters; in them he sought
unconsciously for the mother he had all but lost. He was
alienated from his father in boyhood, and there were def-
inite clashes later. The poet was the oldest of six
children.

He loved his cousin, Harriet Grove, and was engaged
to her. She broke the engagement on account of the
views he entertained. Her parents influenced her in this
action. It was Shelley's first love affair. The poet was
in his nineteenth year when he was jilted; he slept
with a loaded pistol and poiSon near him for some time
after this. In January, 1811, in a letter to his friend,
Hogg, he writes he would have followed Harriet to the
end of the earth. He asks his- friend never to mention
her. He tells of a personal interview with Harriet

'. 209

210 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

and laments that she is gone and that he still
breathes and lives. On January ii he wrote: "She
is gone! She is lost to me forever! She married! Mar-
ried to a clod of earth; she will become as insensible her-
self; all those fine capabilities will moulder." She had,
however, not yet married. It was the recollections of
these acute sufferings that he later put into the mouth
of the maniac in Jidian and Maddalo; those poignant
ravings were for a half century regarded as impersonal,
and were never thought to be directed against a real
woman whom he loved.

In the latter part of March, 1811, the poet was ex-
pelled from Oxford for his pamphlet on atheism. In the
meantime he had met Harriet Westbrook and married
her, in a spirit of gallantry, in the latter part of August,
181 1 ; he sympathised with her because of her sufferings
at home. He also liked Elizabeth Kitchener at the time,
and later asked her to come and live with his wife and
himself. She did so about July, 1812. Shelley's wife had
no liking for her, so Miss Kitchener was practically
bribed by the poet to leave. This she did in November.
Shelley was disillusioned in her, and he really had very
little in common with her, though she was intellectually
superior to Harriet, Shelley's wife.

In July, 1 8 14, Shelley deserted his wife. A few weeks
later he left with Mary Godwin, with whom he had been
friendly since the spring of the year. On December,
1816, Harriet committed suicide by drowning, while preg-
nant.

Shelley married his second wife legally December 30,
1816. He probably was not madly in love with her.
Mention should be made of two cases of unreciprocated
affection for him on the part of the poet's two sisters-in-
law, Fanny Godwin, who committed suicide, and Jane

SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 211

Clairmont, the daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a previous
marriage, and also known as the mistress of Byron.

The two women whom Shelley loved after his marriage
and who inspired some of his best poetry were Emilia
Viviani and Mrs. James Williams. Shelley met Miss
Viviani about December, 1820. That winter he wrote
the Epipsyckidion, which was a love poem to her; here
he also told us the history of his love affairs. In June,
1822, he refers to his disillusionment with her. About
this time his feeling for his friend's wife, Mrs. Williams,
overpowered him, and he wrote a number of lyrics to her.
He was drowned July 8, 1822, with Mr. Williams.

Shelley never had a satisfactory love affair in his life.
He was discarded by his first love, for whom his affec-
tion was strong. He did not love his first wife at all,
and his second wife did not give him that satisfaction in
love for which he craved. Hence he yearned after
others. His new affairs brought him no happiness, as he
was disillusioned in his Emilia, while Mrs. Williams was
married to his friend; social intercourse was for a while
stopped between Shelley £md the Williamses on account
of Shelley's love. Two other women who cared for him
did not attract him. This whole state of affairs led to
some of his best poems, brought out some of his views
on free love, and influenced his lyrics. We will exam-
ine how his poetry arose from the depths of his uncon-
scious.

Julian and Maddalo was first sketched in 18 14. The
maniac's soliloquy, which is one of the most forceful out-
cries of love disappointment in poetry, inspired by per-
sonal experience, and is, with Swinburne's The Triumph
of Time, among the greatest of all such products in lit-
erature, is Shelley's own outburst. It is his full fury cast
at Harriet Grove, and was not, as surmised by Arabella

212 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

Shore {Gentleman's Magazine [1887], v. 263, p. 329).
and H. S. Salt {Shelley Society Papers [1888], p. 325),
directed against his first wife. He never loved her as
that maniac loved; besides, it was not true of Harriet
Westbrook that she ceased to love Shelley. It is said
that the poet believed her guilty of adultery while living
with him, but even if this were so (and we have no evi-
dence to warrant such a belief), the poet had been cast-
ing longing eyes at Mary Godwin, his future second wife,
for some time before he left his first wife; we have no
proof that the poet was heartbroken after he left Harriet
Westbrook, though he sympathised with her.

His affair with Harriet Grove was not the ephemeral
thing that William Sharp deems it, in his biography of the
poet. For even when married to Harriet Westbrook, he
was still chagrined about the first Harriet. When Miss
Grove married a cousin in the fall of 181 1, a few months
after his own marriage, the poet wrote to her brother,
asking how he liked his brother-in-law, and added sar-
castically and bitterly, "A new brother as well as a new
cousin must be an invaluable acquisition." This was in
October 28, 1811. Harriet Grove's conduct had caused
him to spend many sleepless nights, and only a few
months before his marriage to Miss Westbrook he had
suicidal thoughts. He wrote sad love verses and a com-
plaint i-gainst love's perfidy. Captain Kennedy describes
Shelley, in June, 1 813, as playing on the piano a favourite
tune which Harriet Grove used to play for him. (Dow-
den's Life of Shelley, p. 390.) It was in the next year
' that he sketched the poem, Julian and Maddalo, and
while it is likely that in the final version, which was
written four years later though published after his
death, unconscious emotions regarding Harriet West-
brook were fused into the poem along with the indig-

SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 213

nation at Harriet Grove. The reference to the tomb
for which the lady addressed in the poem deserted
the poet, may have been suggested by the dead Harriet
Westbrook; but this fact is not sufficient reason for re-
garding her the subject of the poem, as Miss Shore and
Mr. Salt do. We should look for truth beyond such in-
cidental references. The pain in this poem is the memory
of a far greater and earlier agony than that Shelley ex-
perienced by Harriet Westbrook's infidelity; rather of
the grief that Harriet Grove caused him. The passages
in the letters to Hogg prove that the poet's sorrow was
too keen for him to forget; he could not help but put
them unconsciously in this poem.

There are references to Harriet Grove in Epipsychidion
written in the early winter of 1821. Mr. Flea, in an
article on The Story of Shelley's Life in Epipsychidion,
contends correctly that Harriet Grove is the "one with
the voice which was envenomed melody," from whose
cheeks flew a killing air which lay upon the leaves of the
poet's heart and made him feel the ruins of age. The
bitterness of this passage is equal to that in Julian and
Maddalo, and hence the lines do not refer to some vulgar
affair as some critics think.

Shelley had written some of his earliest sad and lugu-
brious love poems to Harriet Grove, and they appeared in
1 810, in the volume Victor and Cazir, a copy of which
book the poet presented to Harriet Grove. In the No-
vember of the same year, when he was losing her,
he published Posthumous fragments of Margaret Nichol-
son, and the concluding poem, "Melody to a Scene of
Former Times," has all the pain of the Maniac's solilo-
quy in Julian and Maddalo, and was, no doubt, written
to Harriet Grove. It has passages of reproach like those
in that poem.

214 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

The best-knovm lines in the latter poem are:

"Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suflfering what they teach in song.''

The reader may think that it is utterly insignificant
whether the Julian poem was written about the first Har-
riet instead of the second, but this is just as important
as to know that, let us say, Arthur Hallam, and not some
one else, is the person mourned by Tennyson in In
Memoriam. And we are enabled to learn the influence
upon his work and ideas when we understand the nature
of the earliest sex repression in the poet's life. This af-
fair in Shelley's nineteenth year was of vast import; it
made the Shelley we know, the enemy of society and the
reformer.

He hated intolerance, religion and monarchy because
by his heterodoxy and the offence it gave to Harriet
Grove's parents, he lost her; not to mention that he also
lost his mother's love for his radical views. He saw the
world steeped in error, and he believed this condition
made him lose the love of his betrothed and of his
mother. He wrote to Hogg that he would never forgive
intolerance. "It is the only point on which I allow my-
self to encourage revenge; every moment shall be devoted
to my object which I am able to spare." Here in the
words of this youth we see the main factor which led to
writing Prometheus Unbound and The Revolt of Islam.
His plans shaped themselves at the time of the jilting,
and he never swerved from them. And in the opening
stanzas of the eleventh canto of the Islam poem he again
describes the agonies of his lost love, with Harriet Grove
in mind, no doubt. This poem was written in the sum-
mer of 1817. Shelley then became an uncompromising

SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 215

reformer because he had suffered in love for his radical
ideas; hence he would make it his aim to spread the
views which he held so that in the future other lovers
should not lose their sweethearts because of liberal no-
tions. And in the Ode to the West Wind Shelley's
prayer is to spread his ideas over the universe.

Though the poet wrote a few good poems to Harriet
Westbrook and dedicated Queen Mab to her, she had
little or no influence on his life except to bring him sor-
row because of her suicide. One of the few references
to her in his later work is in the Epipsychidion, "And
one was true — oh! why not true to me?" Stopford
Brooke thinks this refers to Harriet Grove, but this is not
likely, as Shelley continues, "there shone again deliver-
ance," and he speaks of one who was to him like the
Moon. The Moon was, of course, his second wife, Mary
Godwin, who immediately succeeded Harriet Westbrook.

n

The Epipsychidion tells us of the poet's love adven-
tures and gives us his beautiful dream of love. In Alastor
he had depicted his longing for love; the poem was writ-
ten in 1815 at the time he was living with Harriet West-
brook; it shows how lonely he felt and how he longed for
love. In Epipsychidion, where he speaks of his lying
"within a chaste, cold bed," he says that he had not the
full measure of love from his second wife. Hence he took
refuge in building a fanciful isle where he satisfies his
love with Emilia Viviani. In this great poem Shelley
gives us a glimpse into his polygamously inclined uncon-
scious. He states his philosophy of free love in the
poem. As physical desire was a strong factor in Keats's
one solitary love, the trait most characteristic of Shelley

2i6 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

was his polygamous instinct. This is present in the un-
conscious of the male, and society has tried to eradicate
it by marriage. We all know that there has never been
complete success in this direction. The instinct which is
repressed bursts forth especially when the marriage has
not been successful, or when the man does not love his
wife in full measure, though as the world is aware it
breaks out even in cases where he does love. Neither
of Shelley's two marriages gave him the real love he
sought. He wanted other women to live in his house-
hold. He invited Miss Titchener to live with him
and Harriet Westbrook, and he had Jane Clairmont, his
wife's half sister, who fell in love with him, live with
them. He thought he would be happy with Miss Viviani,
but was disillusioned with her soon, and then his polyga-
mous instinct made Mrs. Jane WiUiams the object of his
affections. Yet Shelley led a chaste, upright life and did
not satisfy his instincts for polygamy; instead, he wrote
poetry. He created fantasies because of his repressions,
and gave us the beautiful day dream closing the Epi-
psyckidion.

Mrs. Williams inspired some of the greatest lyrics in
the language. The painful poem to her husband begin-
ning with the words, "The serpent is shut out from para-
dise," tells how he flies because Mrs. Williams's looks
stir griefs that should sleep and hopes that cannot die.
The world owes to Shelley's attachment for Mrs. Wil-
liams such poems as, Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou,
Spirit of Delight, One Word Is too Often Profaned, When
the Lamp is Shattered, Oh, World! Oh, Hope! Oh, Time!
Rough Wind, That Moanest Loud, With a Guitar, To
Jane, To Jane — the Invitation, To Jane — the Recollec-
tion, Remembrance, Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici,
and The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient. Here are a

SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 217

dozen poems that every lover of Shelley knows, yet they
axe the outpourings of the poet's love for another man's
wife, written because he could not attain that love and
satisfy his polygamous instincts. Had these instincts
been satisfied, these beautiful poems would have been
lost to the world.

We now come to two of his greatest odes. To the
Wild West Wind and To the Skylark. Here, as in
the case of Keats's two great odes, the critics have feared
to trace the poems to a love repression on the part of the
poet. In fact, most criticisms of the poems treat them
as alien to the subject of love. And yet unconsciously
Shelley is here voicing his longing for love and giving
vent to his unconscious polygamous instinct. Mr. Crib-
ble, in his Romantic Life of Shelley, surmises that the
poet is really unconsciously expressing dissatisfaction
with his married life. When Shelley wrote these poems
he was still groping for love; he lived with his sec-
ond wife, and as far as we know had no love affair. He
had not yet fallen in love with either Miss Vivian! or
Mrs. Williams.

The Ode to the West Wind was written in the fall of
1 8 19. The poet at the time was unhappy; a child of his
had died, and his wife was suffering great depression.
When the poet was complaining that he was falling on
the thorns of life and bleeding, and speaking of the "au-
tumnal tone" in his life, he was referring to the
repression of his love life. He lived with Mary
whom he did not love passionately. If he concludes
his poem with the prayer that the wind drive his
dead thoughts over the universe to quicken a new
birth, he wants to profit by this in love. He unconsci-
ously meant that if his ideas on free love should prevail,
he would be able to take a new love without reproach

2i8 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

and without suffering such misfortunes as he did when
he deserted his first wife. He had been deprived of his
children and was driven to exile from his native land a
year and a half previously, March, 1818. It has been one
of the ironies of Shelley's fate that the world has admired
this West Wind ode greatly, and tabooed the most im-
portant idea Shelley wanted spread, that of free love. So
if we read between the lines in this great ode pleading
for the dissemination of his idea, we find the poet's un-
conscious stating he is unhappy and is longing for an-
other love than that of his wife. He pleads for a satis-
faction of his polygamous instincts. Should the reader
think this conclusion untenable, I can reply that the
facts we have of the poet's life give it unqualified sup-
port. Let us also remember that the fructifying wind was
always a sex symbol.

It is the same with The Ode to the Skylark, written
nearly a year later. He envies the bird its happiness.
"Shadow of annoyance never came near thee," he says to
it. "Thou lovest — but ne'er knew love's sad satiety."
Here he betrays himself by a few words. He has had his
satiety of love, and sad it was, without satisfying him.
He doesn't love his present wife; he never cared deeply
for his first wife; his first sweetheart rejected him; and
he had been loved by girls he did not love. All these
facts justify us in selecting the words, "love's sad satiety"
and assigning them a definite meaning. Had we known
nothing of the poet's biography we could not have
spoken with such conviction. He sings "our sweetest
songs are those that tell of saddest thought." His sad-
dest thoughts have been those about the difficulties of
finding love's ideal, and of loving another when pledged
to some one else. Then we have the unconscious sex

SHELLEY'S PERSONAL LOVE POEMS 219

symbolism in the wish to be happy like the flying sing-
ing bird.

Psychoanalytic methods applied to Shelley reveal him
then, in his love poems and in lyrics which were not sup-
posed to deal with love, as a chaste man with polygamous
inclinations and married to a woman he did not love
passionately. There is a connection between this state
of affairs and his interest in scattering liberal ideas. That
he also mistook real love for platonic love may be seen
by Epipsychidion and the poems to Mrs. Williams. Un-
conscious love elements were at the basis of other poems
of his, like the Ode to Dejection.

Alastor, Julian and Maddalo and Epipsychidion of the
longer poems, his dozen lyrics inspired by love for Mrs.
Williams, and his two famous odes represent the personal
Shelley from the love side, and are among the greatest
poems in any language.

A few words should be said about Adonais, his great
elegy on Keats. It is one of his personal poems, and
among the best known lines are those describing himself,
"who in another's fate wept his own." The critics who
attacked the work of Keats, though they did not, as
Shelley erroneously thought, drive Keats to death, were
the very reviewers who attacked Shelley and his ideas.
Even in this grand elegy Shelley was also bemoaning un-
consciously his failure, and complaining that his ideas on
free love, liberal religion and republicanism were attacked.

CHAPTER XVI

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

Edgar Allan Poe proves an interesting study from
the point of view of psychoanalysis. He has been
analysed by pathologists and psychologists, but there
remains much to be said about the work of this baffling
genius. I can take up only a few phases of the pathetic
life and great work of Poe.

One question that has interested critics is, what was the
source of those mysterious ladies in his stories, the Ligeias,
the Morellas, the Eleonoras? What made him so pre-
occupied with the subject of the death of beautiful women
long before his own wife died? All this brings us to a
little emphasised chapter in Poe's life, the history of one
of his love affairs before he married Virginia Clemm. Its
influence on his work has hardly ever been noted by
critics, and yet the effect was of great importance.

Poe lost his parents when he was an infant, and he
was adopted by Mr. Allan. He loved the mother of a
friend of his, Mrs. Stannard, and when she died (he was
IS at the time), he was inconsolable. But the history of
this boyish love is not fully known to us. As a boy of
sixteen he loved Sarah Elmira Royster, whom he again
met later in life and to whom he became engaged shortly
before his death. At about the age of twenty or there-

220

EDGAR ALLAN POE 221

after he loved his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Herring, and
wrote several poems to her.

The real clue toJPoe^ life and work is furnished in an
article^ '5'pe^s^Maryj;;, that ^peaSairi"ff?Er]&Bf's ilf aga-
zine for March, 1889, by Agustus Van Cleef. It reports
a conversation with a woman who was Poe's sweetheart
and who rejected him. Her name is now known to us as
Mary Devereaux. The main facts of the article have
not been questioned by his biographers. The substance
of the interview is this: Mary Devereaux met Poe
through a flirtation. Her memory did not serve her as
to the date, which she put in 1835. But since Poe was
betrothed to Virginia that year, and had been betrothed
to her for some time, the date was probably 1832, as the
author of the article surmises, though Killis Campbell
believes the year was 1831. Mary returned the poet's
love, and he called on her almost every evening for a
year. She jilted him, and Poe horsewhipped a relation
of hers as being responsible for his loss. He wrote for
a Baltimore paper a poem of six or eight verses express-
ing his indignant sentiments. This passion continued
with Poe, buried in his unconscious, even after he married
Virginia Clemm. The day before Virginia died, in 1847,
Mary was at the Poe household, and Virginia said to her:
"Be a friend to Eddie, and don't forsake him; he always
loved you — didn't you, Eddie?"

There is an account in the article of a scene that oc-
curred in the spring of 1842. Poe tried at the time to see
Mary, who was then a married woman, at her home in
Jersey City. He reproached her and shouted that she did
not love her husband, and he tried to force her to corrobo-
rate his words. He had been inquiring for her, and made
up his mind he would see her even "if he had to go to
hell" to do it. When he saw her, he was somewhat

222 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

soothed, and she sang to him his favourite song, "Come
Rest in This Bosom." She had sung this for him in the
early days, and also at a visit she paid him in Philadel-
phia not long before his Jersey City visit. After this epi-
sode at her home the poet was found in the woods wan-
dering about like one crazy.

Mary Devereaux scoffed at the idea that the poet's
child wife was the great passion of his life. /It was
always known, in spite of Poe's tenderness for Virginia,
that he never found intellectual companiondiip in her.
Poe married Virginia in May, 1836, when he was 27
and she 14 years old. He was living in 1833 with the
Clemms in Baltimore, and had taken out a marriage
license on September 22, 1835, but Virginia was then too
young for marriage.

The relation of Mary to his work will soon appear. I
wish to show first that the splendid love poem. To One
in Paradise, appearing in the tale The Assignation, was,
with the story, inspired by Mary. Visionary, the original
title of The Assignation, appeared with the poem in Jan-
uary, 1834, in Godey's Lady's Book, and hence was writ-
ten in 1833, or before. It was among the tales submitted
in the prize contest that year in which Poe was success-
ful with one of his stories. When Poe later obtained em-
ployment on The Southern Literary Messenger, he re-
printed here some of his tales; this tale was reprinted in
July, 1835. The clue comes now. In the same number
of the Messenger there is a poem entitled To Mary, by
Poe, beginning, "Mary amid the cares — the woes," whidi
in sentiments and ideas is but another version of To One
in Paradise in the Visionary. This poem To Mary ap-
pears in Poe's poetical works under the title To F .

He reprinted this poem, which was originally written to
his love Mary, in Graham's Magazine for March, 1842,

EDGAR ALLAN POE 223

and changed the first line and called the poem no longer
To Mary, but To One Departed, very suggestive of
the To One in Paradise. Poe, who would make a poem
written to one lady serve, by a few changes in its text,
for another later woman friend, gave this poem its present
title. To F , when he reprinted it in the 1845 Broad-
way Journal in honour of the poet Frances S. Osgood,
whom he met that year*

If we compare To One in Paradise with To F

there will be no doubt that they were inspired by the
same person and written at the same time, 1833, when
the affair with Mary was over. In both poems references
are made to his sweetheart being an isle in the sea and
covered with flowers over which the sun smiles. In each
poem mention is made of the desolate condition of the
poet who derives happiness from living in dreams con-
nected with her. To F is not as perfect as the

other, but the idea underlying each poem is the same.
The sonnet To Zante also has the same imagery, and
was written, no doubt, at the same time to Mary.

To One in Paradise is supposed to be written by the
lover in the story Assignation, in which it appears. It
will be recalled that the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite in
that tale had written the poem in a volume of Politian's
tragedy, a page of which was blotted with tears. Poe is
that lover and Marchesa Aphrodite is Mary. But we

*He honoured Mrs. Osgood in the same way by republishing
another poem from the Southern Literary Messenger of Sep-
tember, 1835, written for some Eliza and opening "Eliza, let
thy generous heart." This poem in the poetical works of Poe
bears the title, "Lines Written in an Album." It originally
was written, Woodberry surmises, to his employer's daughter,
Eliza White, though Whitty believes it was addressed to his
future wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm. Yet it is very likely the
poem was written to one of his early sweethearts, Elizabeth
Herring.

224 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

know also that Poe is the author of the poem Scenes
from Politian, which was written about the time he
loved Mary. It was published in the Southern Literary
Messenger in December, 1835. In these scenes Poe iden-
tified himself with Politian, who loves Lalage and asks
her to fly to America. "Wilt thou fly to that Paradise?"
he asks her. The reference to Politian in Assignation is
then significant, and the tears on the leaf of the play
shed by the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite, the dreamer,
were Poe's own for his lost Mary. The poet looked upon
her as dead to him, and hence in a later version of the

poem to her, To F , he changes the title to To One

Departed; when he wrote To One in Paradise he
looked upon her as dead. Mary was, by the way, a name
that haunted him, and in his Marginalia he advances his
belief in the correct theory that Byron's only real love
affair was with Mary Chaworth.

I am not so dogmatic as to maintain that in writing the
Assignation and the three poems I mentioned, and the
Politan scenes, his other earlier loves did not un-
consciously make themselves felt. Killis Campbell thinks
To One in Paradise and the sonnet To Zante were
written to Miss Royster. Poe may also have been think-
ing of the mother of his friend who died, in the poem To
One in Paradise. But it is most likely that his love for
Mary chiefly inspired these poems. They were certainly
not written to Virginia, for in 1833 she was only 11 years
old.

The poem to Mary Devereaux, supposed to have been
written for a Baltimore paper, may, as Woodberry sur-
mises, be the To F poem, although it is not so

severe as Mary said the poem he wrote against her was.
Either her memory failed her as to the alleged severity of
the poem, or the poem has not been discovered. A poem

EDGAR ALLAN POE 225

by Poe was only recently unearthed by Prof. J. C.
French, of Johns Hopkins University, and printed in the
Dial for January 31, 19 18. It was called Serenade,
and was published in the Baltimore Visiter, April 20,
1833. The girl addressed is given a fictitious name, Ade-
line. Whether she is Mary, or not I cannot venture to
say with certainty, but most likely she is. It was pub-
lished when the affair was probably over, and may have
been written at the height of his love a year previously.
Here are some lines from it:

"And earth, and stars, and sea, and sky
Are redolent of sleep as I
Am redolent of thee and thine
Enthralling love, my Adeline,
But list, O list, — so soft and low
Thy lover's voice to-night shall flow
That scarce awake thy soul shall deem
My words the music of a dream."

The lover in Assignation, in which To One in Para-
dise appeared then is Poe, and his dreamy character is
in accordance with all the other self portrayals we have
of the poet. The description of the Marchpsa, no doubt,
was inspired by Mary.

I think that the tale of Ligeia, which Poe considered his
best story, was unconsciously inspired by Mary, and it
hence calls for a new interpretation. It was published
in September, 1838, two years after he married Virginia;
but the poet's memories still hearken back to Mary. She
is the dead Ligeia, and his wife, Virginia, is the Lady
Rowena, whom the narrator married after Ligeia died.
The story of Ligeia was suggested by a dream. The
poem The Conqueror Worm did not originally appear
in the body of the tale. The narrator's memory, we will
recall, flew back to the dead Ligeia; he called her name

226 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

in dreams; ever after Rowena was dead he had a thousand
memories of Ligeia. The emphasis throughout the tale
on the love for the departed Ligeia which will not die
shows the real love the poet felt for Mary, about whom
he was thinking. The narrator imagines that the dead
Ligeia put a poison into the cup of his second wife, Lady
Rowena, and that thus the latter dies. He then sinks
into visions of Ligeia. He imagines that the corpse of his
wife becomes alive, and as he looks at it, it is transformed
into "my lost love" Ligeia. In other words, the dead
love still lives and will not die; it is not forgotten, and
haunts the poet, just as love for Mary haunted him. The
quotation from Glanvil that man does not yield to death,
applies as well to dead love.

In this tale we see then the unconscious influence which
an earlier love held on Poe. It is a tale of dead
love as much as of death.

Mary enters into another famous tale where her pres-
ence was never suspected, in Eleonora. It has been
thought that Eleonora was the poet's wife, Virginia, but
the tale of the "Valley of Many Colored Grass" refers
to the happy days when he courted Mary, and the sad
change when Eleonora died, that took place in the Valley,
describes the poet's grief when Mary jilted him. The
story appeared in 1841 in Tke Gift for 1842. Whether
it was written before Virginia burst a blood vessel, in
1841, as is likely, or afterwards, matters not. For in
the tale, which was certainly written six years before Vir-
ginia died, the narrator thinks of a second marriage after
the death of Eleonora, and Poe was surely not thinking
of a second marriage in 1841. We recall in the tale that
the narrator had vowed never to love or marry again
after he lost Eleonora, but he does — he marries Ermen-
grade, who is really Virginia, since Eleonora is Mary. The

EDGAR ALLAN POE 227

narrator believes he hears the voice of Eleonora forgiving
him for his marriage. The poet tells us then in this tale
that in spite of his great love for Mary he was able after
her rejecting him, still to care for and marry some one
else.

The strongest passion of his youth was Mary and not
Miss Royster. When he became engaged' later in life
to Miss Royster it was due to worldly reasons, and he
once broke the engagement. I believe that the fact that
Poe and his wife were cousins and that she burst a blood-
vessel gave rise to the theory that Eleonora, who is a
cousin of the narrator, was Virginia.

Another earlier tale of the period of Assignation and
submitted in the prize contest at Baltimore, and hence
written by 1833, is Morella. In Morella, Mary is still
present in the person of the first Morella, whom the nar-
rator marries and who dies; again we have a symbol of
Mary's dead love. Morella leaves him a daughter also
called Morella, and this may be a description of the pater-
nal feeling Poe entertained at the time for Virginia, who
was then 11 years old. In the tale the second Morella
also dies.

The sadistic story, Berenice, of the same period, also
has memories of Mary.

These stories with fanciful names like Ligeia, Eleonora,
Morella, Berenice and the tale Assignation were given
us by the poet from the depths of his unconscious; love
repressions starting from the death of his own mother in
infancy, the loss of his foster mother, Mr. Allan's first
wife, the grief at the death of his friend's mother, the
quarrel with Mr. Allan's second wife, the love affairs with
Miss Royster, and Miss Herring, but especially the re-
jection by Mary entered into the influences, which made
up not only the poems and tales previously mentioned,

228 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

but much of his later work. He was neurotic because
he lost his mother in infancy and had many love disap-
pointments. The only tale where he gives an account of
the love emotions is in The Spectacles, written before
or about 1844, and here he drew on his experiences, prob-
ably chiefly from memories of Mary.

Now comes a question that has always puzzled his
critics: Why was the poet so occupied with the subject
of death of fair ladies or of depicting a man bereaved by
the death of his love. Many replies have been made, but
not altogether satisfactorily. The most common answer
is that he was so occupied with the subject because he
lost his own wife, Virginia. Some uninformed critics are
of the belief that poems like The Raven and The
Sleeper, tales like Eleonora and Ligeia, were written
after his wife died. As a matter of fact these, with the
exception of The Raven and possibly Eleonora, were
written even before Virginia burst a blood-vessel. There
is evidence to make us believe tha t Ulaume, w hich is
taken to refer to the death of his wife, was at lelst com-
menced before Mrs. Poe's death, in January, 1847; Anna-
bel Lee was, however, written after that date. Nearly all
of Poe's short stories, too, had been published by that
time. He was occupied with the subject of death long
before he married; he mourns the death of women
in Lenore, Tamerlane, and The Sleeper, all written
before he was twenty-two years old. His first tales,
Assignation, Ligeia, Morella, deal with the subject of
women's deaths. So those who believe that he may have
imagined Virginia dead after she burst a blood-vessel, and
hence wrote as if she had died, are not right. For all
the stories of this nature with the doubtful exception of
Eleonora were written before she burst a blood-vessel.
The Raven and The Conqueror Worm, two poems

EDGAR ALLAN POE 229

occupied with death, were written before her death but
after her hemorrhage.

Poe tells us in his Philosophy of Composition, — an un-
convincing account of the origin of The Raven, — that
he regards the death of a beautiful maiden the most poet-
ical and melancholy topic. But there were factors that
made him think so, and these were the deaths of women
he loved and the rejections by girls with whom he was
infatuated. He lost his mother when he was three years
old. Mrt; Lann ^i-d , whn is said to have inspired To
Helen, and who was "the first pure ideal love of my
soul" (Poe) died when he was fifteen. (She is also
said to have inspired The Sleeper.) He lost Mrs. Allan,
his foster mother, to whom he was greatly attached, when
he was twenty. He had also lost three sweethearts by
the time he was twenty-three. These he looked upon as
departed or gone from him. In the Bridal Ballad,
written probably on the occasion of the marriage of Miss
Royster, he refers to himself as a dead lover. The poem

To F , To One in Paradise, and To Zante, as I

showed, were most likely written to Mary, though he
may have had the others in mind, who either died or
were gone from him. All this shows the strong infantile
influences on Poe in damming up of his libido. He was,
therefore, occupied with the subject of death not because
of Virginia's illness or death, but because he lost, before
he was twenty-three, six girls or women. His interest in
the subject made him hope death could be conquered or
stayed, and hence we have Ligeia and The Facts in the
Case of Valdemar. There is a philosophic treatment of
death in The Colloquy of Monos and Una.

230 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

II

Tales of burial alive, such as The Casque of Amontilla-
do, The Black Cat, etc., are also characteristic of Poe.

What is the significance of Foe's interest in the sub-
ject of burial alive and in people who are guilty of bury-
ing others alive? Very few people would probably accept
Freud's theory, but that master psychologist as a rule
bases his theories on facts, and hence I will quote his
views on the subject. In a footnote of his book on The
Interpretation of Dreams, p. 244, he says: "It is only of
late that I have learned to value the significance of
fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb.
They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by
so many people of being buried alive, as well as the pro-
foundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after
death, which represents nothing but a projection into the
future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of
birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and in
this the source and model of the emotion of fear."

.Would Freud's theory not also account for Poe's great
gift of the analysis and depiction of the' emotion of fear?

Morbid fear or anxiety is well depicted by Poe,
especially in his Fall of the House of Usher. As we learn
from psychoanalysis, morbid fear is inhibited sexual de-
sire; it is a reaction against the libido. The individual's
sexual impulses incapable of being repressed strive for
forms of wish fulfilment, and these when repugnant are
treated like something hostile, and provoke fear. Morbid
fear differs from normal fear in being continuous and at-
tributed to a source which is not the real one, the actual
source being unconscious. If a woman, for example, is
very much in love with a man who turns out to be a vile

EDGAR ALLAN POE 231

criminal, her love may become incapable of being ful-
filled any longer because of the part played by her moral
sense; shrinking from contemplating her love's fulfilment
with the man she really still loves, she may develop an
anxiety. This is only one of the innumerable cases of mis-
directed desire that may cause anxiety. Then there are
physiological factors responsible also. Dr. Brink has
made a study of the subject.

Poe had himself suffered from a damming of the
libido. He is Roger Usher, and is describing his own
morbid fear. One feels that the narrator of the tale pre-
sents a case of psychosis, for he sees impossible things
happen. He imagines the house had a pestilent vapour
about it. He tells us that Roger's condition infected him,
and that the wild influences of Roger's fantastic and im-
pressive superstition crept over him. He must have been
deranged, for he imagines that he sees Roger's dead sister,
whose coffin had been screwed down by them, come out
of the vault and drag Roger to death. He also thinks he
sees the house crumble into fragments and sink into the
tarn. Either his whole narrative is a hallucination or
only these few parts of it are.

Roger himself, however, is the real type of sufferer
from morbid fear. He has inherited a peculiar disposi-
tion, and no doubt suffered from repressions, though noth-
ing is said about this. He attributes his disease largely
to anxiety about his sick sister. Lady Madeline. But
the cause is in his unconscious. Those who are ac-
quainted with the theories of psychoanalysis and the life
of Poe will feel that Roger, like Poe, must have lost a
mother early, then the mother of a friend, then his foster-
mother. He also, like Poe, was no doubt thrice disap-
pointed in love, and probably also drank. His symptoms
were such as afflict neurotics. He was in constant terror

232 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

and felt that he must die soon in some struggle with fear;
he dreaded the future. He read strange books and im-
agined queer things. His sister died, and, with the aid
of the narrator of the story, was buried in a vault in the
house. He soon entertained fancies that he had buried
her alive, and he was in mortal fear that she would
wreak vengeance on him. When the teller of the story
read to Roger some pages of a romance, Roger inter-
preted various unrelated actions described there as a rend-
ing of her coffin and the grating of iron hinges on her
prison. He imagined she stood outside, and then that
he was being crushed to death by her. And he died in
fear. The vision of his sister was imaginary with him
and the narrator as well, for Lady Madeline could not
have escaped from the screwed down coffin and the vault,
and having lain many days without food, would not have
had strength to crush her brother to death. Usher died
because of morbid fear.

Poe was a good delineator of the neuroses. Here we
have a picture of his own life and know that he must
have experienced some sort of anxiety, as the tale is so
true to life. He was only thirty when the story was pub-
lished, and the main character here, as in Berenice and
the Assignation, is a neurotic. Behind it all one sees the
mourner for the lost Lenore, the orphan, the victim of
love through Stella Royster, Elizabeth Herring and Mary
Devereaux.

Poe had also another trait, and that was a sadistic one.
This accounts for his tales of people torturing and being
tortured, as The Pit, and the Pendulum, and the Cask of
Amontillado. He was sadistic as any one can see by his
delight in writing critical articles calculated to cause
writers intense pain. He punished his enemies by venting
his hatred upon them in his essays. He had an unconsci-

EDGAR ALLAN POE 233

ous instinct to cause pain for the mere sake of pain. He \^
hints at this in his Imp of the Perverse, where he lays
down a theory which is undoubtedly true, but which
moralists try to shun. "I am not more certain that I
breathe than that the assurance of the wrong or error of
an action is often the one unconquerable force which
impels us and alone impels us to its prosecution." He
was also masochistic, he unconsciously liked to cause pain
to himself. In his The Black Cat he calls perverseness
one of the primitive impulses of the human heart, and he
speaks of it as "the unfathomable longing of the soul to
vex itself — to offer violence to its own nature, to do
wrong for the wrong's sake only." Poe, as a child, had/
the sadistic and masochistic instincts. He is fascinatea
by contemplation of suffering, and in his Premature Bjmal '
speaks of the pleasurable pain we get from reading of
terrible catastrophes.

His sadism and masochism figure considerably in his
art. He could not carry out his desires to punish in life,
and hence found a refuge in literature. We often carry
out in imagination what we cannot actually do; and we
wreak punishment and revenge that way; if we are au-
thors we make books with such ideas. A very simple il-
lustration will serve in Poe's case, yet it has never been
noted. In Poe's tale The Cask of Amontillado the motive
is revenge. The narrator vowed vengeance upon Fortunato,
who had added insult to injury. He buries him in a vault.
In his fancy Poe was punishing a real enemy, and though
he had several, he hated none more than the author of
Alice Ben Bolt, Dr. Thomas Dunn English. It is re-
lated he once sought the doctor, saying he wanted to kill
him. The tale was published in Godeys Lady's Book for
November, 1846, and was written probably a few months
before. In July of that year Poe published the savage

234 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN i^ITERATURE

and violent letter to English in retaliation for English's
reply to a very hostile article about him by Poe in the
Literati. Poe's hatred for Dr. English is almost murder-
ous. It is plausible to assume that a writer would un-
consciously have his most bitter antagonist in mind while
writing a bitter tale of revenge at the time of his most
intense hatred for him. Poe was not satisfied with his
own savage reply, and instituted a suit of damages for
defamation of character, which was rewarded with a ver-
dict several months after the publishing of his tale. In
the story Poe wrote: "I must not only punish, but pun-
ish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retri-
bution overtakes its redresser." He calls Fortunato a
quack in painting and gemmary, as he had called Dr.
English a charlatan in literature, who did not know the
rules of grammar. So this is an illustration of how
sadism made him unconsciously write at least one tale of
punishing an enemy by burying him alive.

in

After all, Poe is chiefly the dreamer and author of
dream literature. The narrator of Berenice tells in detail
how he was always dreaming. In Assignation the lover
says, "To dream has been the business of my life. I
have, therefore, framed for myself a bower of dreams."
In Eleanora the narrator says those who dream by day
obtain glimpses of eternity. Roger Usher was a dreamer.
Poe's Eureka was dedicated to those who dream instead
of those who think. He also wanted to transcend real-
ity. He builded an ideal landscape in The Domain of
Amheim because he thinks art can surpass nature. He
hated the ugliness of to-day and he tried in Some Words
with a Mummy to revive a mummy to tell him of an-

EDGAR ALLAN POE 235

cient Egypt and to give him the secret that enables one
to suspend life temporarily and to be revived again cen-
turies hence. He says in an early poem that all his days
have been a dream. (A Dream Within a Dream.)

Poe was true to the psychology of the dreamer; he cre-
ated things out of his fancies to be as he would like them
to be because he did not have them in reality. He was
poor and described mansions with wonderful furniture.
He was sad because of deaths and lost loves and tried in
some tales to conquer death. His The Raven is really
an anxiety dream. Fear prompted it, the fear that he
would never be with his lost Lenore, who probably was
Mary. She then inspired this his most famous poem.
His characters cannot help being dreamers, for their cre-
ator was one. He was so absorbed in his dreams that he
never tried to take an interest in reality. Hence we find
no moral note in Poe's work; there is one exception, Wil-
liam Wilson. He took no interest in philanthropy, re-
forms, transcendentalism or other movements of the day,
and he disliked Emerson. One would never know from
his work whether he lived at the time he did or in the
eighteenth or twentieth century. One does not know
from his work that there was a Mexican war or a slavery
problem in his day.

The one moral tale Poe wrote, William Wilson, also
has great value to the psychoanalyst. For it is a study
of emotional conflicts and deals with the subject of dual
personality and anticipates Stevenson's famous story,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Poe is William Wilson, and
he even describes his school days in England in the tale.
It is the history of Poe's own struggle with his uncon-
scious, with evil. He too was a gambler and probably
cheated at cards like WiUiam Wilson. There are two
William Wilsons, one representative of the unprincipled.

236 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the criminal, the unconscious primitive instincts in our-
selves, and the other William Wilson who is the voice of
civilisation, the conscious moralist seeking to repress the
other. Surely this great tale is symbolic of man's strug-
gle with his own conscious which civilisation u trying to
tame.

So we leave Poe. Others may take up the question of
his alleged drunkenness and its overestimated effect on
his art. But I have merely wished to point a few things
in his work made clear with the help of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis has given the answer to those who ob-
ject to Poe because of his lack of moral tone.

It should be added that Poe's great attachment to his
mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, was due to the loss of his
own mother in infancy.

Poe's devotion and love for women of his later life,
Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Richmond, Mrs. Lewis, and especially
Helen Whitman, did not influence his work considerably
in spite of the sufferings they caused him, but produced
a few good single poems to some of them, notably, To
Annie, Mrs. Richmond, and To Helen, Mrs. Whitman,
and the pathetic, masterly letters to these women.

CHAPTER XVII

THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN

Lafcadio Hearn anticipated many of Freud's con-
clusions. He understood the unity of life, in the past
with that in the present, and his most persistent thought
is the power and influence of the emotional life of our
very distant ancestors upon our own lives.

A word should be said about Hearn's antecedents. He
has himself left a tribute to his mother, who exerted a
great influence upon him. She was a Greek, though one
biographer, Nina Kennard, conjectures that she had ori-
ental blood. Hearn was very much attached to her and
lost her when he was only six years old by his father di-
vorcing her. This event coloured his entire life. He
tells us that there was a miniature painting in oil of the
Virgin and the Child, on the wall of the room in which he
slept as a child. "I fancied," he says, "that the brown
Virgin represented my mother — ^whom I had almost com-
pletely forgotten — and the large-eyed child myself." In
this infantile phantasy we see how the repressed love
for his mother revived in him and how he identified her
with the Virgin.

He wrote to his brother: "My love of right, my hate
of wrong; — ^my admiration for what is beautiful or true;
— my capacity for faith in man or woman; — my sensi-

237

238 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

tiveness to artistic things which gives me whatever lit-
tle success I have; — even that language-power, whose
physical sign is in the large eyes of both of us, — came
from her. It is the mother who makes us, — makes
at least all that makes the nobler man; not his strength
or powers of calculation, but his heart and power to
love. And I would rather have her portrait than a
fortune."

Hearn knew of the existence of the unconscious in
the Freudian sense, and also of its influence on author-
ship. When he was twenty-eight, in 1878, in a letter
to Mr. Krehbiel he said: "Every one has an inner life
of his own, — ^which no other eye can see, and the great
secrets of which are never revealed, although occa-
sionally when we create something beautiful, we betray
a faint glimpse of it — sudden and brief, as of a door
opening and shutting in the night." {Life and Letters,
Volume I, p. 196.) "Unconscious brain-work is the best
to develop . . . latent feeling or thought. By quietly
writing the thing over and over again, I find that the
emotion or idea often develops itself in the process, —
unconsciously. When the best result comes, it ought
to surprise you, for our best work is out of the Un-
conscious." {Life and Letters, Volume i, p. 140-141.)

Again Hearn realised that fairy tales had their origin
in dreams, an idea that has been developed by Rank,
Abraham and Ricklin, disciples of Freud. Hearn saw
that there was an intimate connection between literature
and dreams. He is one of the first men to have seen
the relation between dreams and supernatural litera-
ture. The following passages are from the lecture on
"The Supernatural in Literature" in the second volume
of Interpretation of Literature. "Whether you 'believe
in ghosts or not, all the artistic elements of ghostly

THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN 239

literature exist in your dreams, and form a veritable
treasury of literary material for the man that knows how
to use them." "Trust to your own dream life; study it
carefully, and draw your inspiration from that. For
dreams are the primary source of almost everything that
is beautiful in the literature which treats of what lies
beyond mere daily experience."

Hearn, with Samuel Butler, is one of the great cham-
^/ pions for the theory about the power of unconscious
memory over us. This idea is one of the axioms of
psychoanalysis, or rather one of its pillars. In his essay,
"About Ancestor Worship" in Kokoro, Hearn develops
his theories of inherited memory at length, and one might
say that there is scarcely an essay of his that does not
touch on the subject. Here he states one of the leading
lessons taught by psychoanalysis. Hearn realised that we
should not starve all our primitive tendencies, as this
would lead to the destruction of some of the highest emo-
tional faculties with which they are blended. The animal
tendencies must be partly extirpated and partly sub-
limated. This is practically Freud's theory that neurosis
is produced by trying to stamp out our sexual impulses
(yet Freud does not mean that we should give these
full play). The following passage from Heam's essay
is part of the prophylaxis of psychoanalysis. "Theo-
logical legislation, irrationally directed against human
weaknesses, has only aggravated social disorders; and
laws against pleasure have only provoked debaucheries.
The history of morals teaches very plainly indeed that
our bad Kami require some propitiation. The passions
still remain more powerful than the reason in man
because they are incomparably older, because they were
once all essential to self-preservation, — ^because they
made that primal stratum, of consciousness out of which

240 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

the nobler sentiments have slowly grown. Never can
they be suffered to rule; but woe to whosoever would
deny their immemorial rights."

He has a similar idea in his essay on "Nirvana." "Men-
tal and moral advance has thus far been effected only
through constant struggles older than reason or moral
feeling, — against the instincts and appetites of primi-
tive brute life. . . . Only through millions of births have
we been able to reach this our present imperfect state;
and the dark bequests of our darkest past are still strong
enough betimes to prevail over reason and ethical feel-
ing."

Ream regarded man as an entity of millions of cells, a
composite of multiples of lives carrying out uncon-
sciously the behests of past ages. Man's instincts are
but unconscious memories of the instincts of old. Whit-
man has this idea in his Song of Myself, and Buddha
taught this idea which Hearn calls "the highest truth
ever taught to man," "the secret unity of life." Hearn
states the view fully in his remarkable essay on Dust.
"All our emotions and thoughts and wishes, however,
changing and growing through the varying seasons of
life, are only compositions and recompositions of the
sensations and ideas and desires of other folk, mostly
of dead people. — I an individual, — ^an individual soul!
Nay, I am a population — a population unthinkable for
multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions! Gen-
erations of generations I am, aeons of aeons." Or as he
states it in another essay, "Ideas of Pre-existence," in
Kokoro: "It is incontrovertible that in every individual
brain is locked up the inherited memory of the abso-
lutely inconceivable multitude of experiences received
by all the brains of which it is the descendant." There
are similar ideas in Jack London's Star Rover.

THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN 241

Heam laid emphasis on the unity of the past and
present, a fundamental principle of psychoanalysis.
Heam saw this idea in Buddhism and hence became at-
tached to the philosophy of this creed, and his reconcilia-
tion of it with the theory of evolution is no mere idle
dream. Leading Buddhist scholars before Hearn saw
the similarity between the theory of heredity as taught
by evolution and the doctrine of Karma or transmigra-
tion of character. This doctrine of Karma explains also
that a man has pernicious unconquered evil instincts
because he is allied to ancestors who possessed them
strongly. Buddhism taught the theory found in evo-
lution and psychoanalysis, that we contain in ourselves
every moral tendency and psychic attribute of millions
of people and animals from whom we have descended.
We are full of shreds of our ancestors' emotions and
characteristics which are buried in our unconscious.

u

Why does Hearn harp on this idea of unconscious
memory throughout his work and in his correspond-
ence? Why was he attracted to the question of the
eternal persistence of life even before he accepted the
philosophy of Buddhism. His pet theory was that noth-
ing could be lost in the universe. In one of his finest
essays, "Reverie," in Kotto, he gives us the secret of his
life. He tells that the mother's smile will survive every-
thing, for life can never disappear finally from the uni-
verse. He first states the materialistic position which as-
sumes that eventually all life will die and naught will be
left of our labours and struggles, and then he gives the
Buddhistic idea, which holds that nothing is lost in the
universe. I think in this essay we have the keynote

242 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

to Hearn's philosophy. He lost faith in Christianity-
early and with it a belief in the immortality of the in-
dividual soul. At the age of six, he lost his mother,
whom he loved, and his scepticism on the subject of
immortality made him feel that his mother was gone
from him eternally. This was painful to him and he
accepted the philosophy of Buddhism as a solace, for
it taught something that was not repugnant to his
scientific sense; that life can never die out entirely, for
the universe always would exist and even if life died
out on our planet, those conditions that made it pre-
vail here would reign either in some other part of the
universe or at a later time. Hence we all would con-
tribute to that life as our ancestors contribute to our
lives. In fact, Hearn once wrote he would not object
to being transformed into an insect. So if life went on
forever he would still know that mother's smile he had
lost in infancy. The Reverie essay is the fesult of his
(Edipus Complex.

In fact, Hearn formulated the idea of the Eternal
Recurrence in 1880 before Nietzsche did, who wept when
he discovered this by no means new theory in August,
1881, at Silas Maria, 6,500 feet above sea. Hearn's essay
on Metempsychosis appeared in the New Orleans Item
and was included in a collection published called Fan-
tastics and Other Fantasies. But Nietzsche became in-
tensely pessimistic as the result of his discovery, since it
meant all life's tragedies would also recur. Hearn, no
doubt, abandoned the theory as a literal possibility after
he read Spencer, but he retained his belief in some of the
main features of it.

When we recall that Buckle, who was a free thinker
in religious matters, still clung to the idea of immortality
of the soul because he could not tolerate the thought

THE IDEAS OF LAFCADIO HEARN 243

of never meeting his dead mother; when we remember
that scientists like Wallace and Fiske, who were among
the pioneers of the theory of evolution, finally embraced
spiritualism as a compensation for their lost faith in
religion, it should not appear fantastic to trace Heam's
views on unconscious inherited memory and on the Bud-
dhistic conception of Metempsychosis, to his loss of both
his mother and his religion; for in his new belief he
could meet his mother and still not sacrifice his intel-
lect to his belief.

Psychoanalysis might be applied to other phases of
Heam's writings, — ^his interest in the gruesome and exotic.
It can explain his interest in other races like the coloured
people and the Japanese; his passion for physical beauty
and his shjoiess. One thing that impresses the lover of
Hearn is the seeming impersonality of his work. Yet
though he says little of himself directly, you can see the
sensitive, half-blind sufferer throughout the work. For
his ideas studied and traced to their source reveal of
themselves the reasons why he embraced them.

He has described ideal love, such no doubt as he must
have felt, in Karma in Lippmcott' s Magazine, May, 1890.
This story has been only recently published in book form.

His affinity for Poe and his adoption of the name
The Raven in his letters to Mr. Watkins is seen in
the projecting of himself upon that unhappy genius
with whom he had so much in common. He, like Poe,
suffered from poverty, from following aristocratic tradi-
tions in intellectual pursuit, in a devotion to physical
beauty, in a love for French literature, in an interest in
extreme suffering, in the divesting of art from morals
and in wandering about from city to city.

CHAPTER XVIII

CONCLUSION

The question now arises, What effect will a knowledge
of the author's unconscious have in making us appreci-
ate his work as literature? Does it matter at all if
we .know whether a particular affair or a certain woman
inspired a poem or not? Many critics protest against
the kind of literary criticism that speculates as to
whether the heroines celebrated in the sonnets of Shake-
speare or Sidney were real or imaginary, whether the
emotions felt by the poets were affected or genuine.
These critics are not usually inclined to admit any con-
nection between an author's life and his work.

One of the great factors in helping us understand liter-
ary works is an acquaintance with some of the episodes
of the author's life. Sainte-Beuve revolutionised literary
criticism by his dictum that the knowledge of an author's
life helps us to follow his work the better. Dr. Johnson
once said that he liked the biographical side of literature.
Isaac D 'Israeli, before Sainte-Beuve, showed in his Lit-
erary Character that he grasped the nature of the inti-
mate relationship between an author and his work.

It is our contention that a literary work is better appre-
ciated after the facts about an author's life are revealed
to us, and this does not usually happen for years after his

244

CONCLUSION 24S

death. One of the reasons why masterpieces cannot be
fully comprehended in an author's lifetime is because we
do not know altogether how he came to write the works
in question. Shelley and Keats were not fully under-
stood by the critics of their times not only because
of their radical views, but because the public did not
know the details of the poets' relations with their parents,
and the women they loved. How could a cold, stern re-
viewer find anything in Epipsychidion or Lamia
unless he was aware of some facts about Emilia Viviani
or Fanny Brawne? How was any fair estimate of either
of these poets possible while the information that later
times have furnished was not at hand? Many people
objected when the letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne
were published forty years ago, but these have helped
us to understand that the cry that pervades them is
the same embodied in music in the Ode to Fanny, the
Ode to the Nightingale and in Lamia.

No true estimate of a man is possible till one reads
the plaints of his that were not meant for the public.
We should not regret the publication of the love let-
ters of the Brownings and Carlyles. Those wonderful
letters are almost as good literature as anything the
authors wrote for the public. We are enabled to see
the writers in an entirely different light from that in
which their own works put them, and to understand
these better.

It was not possible for the age in which Balzac and
Goethe lived, fully to appreciate them, for it did not
have their published correspondence, and could not es-
timate the close connection between unknown episodes
in their lives and their works. I do not mean that the
contemporaries of these poets could not recognise the

246 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

fact that these men were genuises, but they could not
get a proper understanding of them.

In former times criticism was busy, with the questions
of technique, with matters of rhetoric and grammar; a
writer's work furnished opportunities for discussing how
near to old ideas of authorship the author approached.
To-day we study an author in connection with his own
life and with ours. The Shakespearean criticism of the
last century is worth more than that of the two cen-
turies following his death. Coleridge and Hazlitt de-
voted their discussions to showing how the great poet
discussed problems that touched all of us. A number of
studies and books have been published which seek to
educe his personality from his work. I believe Walter
Bagehot was a pioneer in this kind of work. His es-
say on Shakespeare — The Man appeared as early as
1853. The most successful venture of this kind has
been George Brandes's great study. Other works of
this nature are Frank Harris's The Man Shakespeare,
and The Women of Shakespeare, both usually re-
garded as fantastic, but nevertheless deserving credit for
their daring, mistaken as they often are. Leslie Stephen's
and A. C. Bradley's essays in the Studies of a Biographer
and Oxford Lectures on Poetry, respectively deserve spe-
cial mention. Then there are books like David Masson's
Shakespeare Personally, Robert Waters's William
Shakespeare, Portrayed by Himself, and Goldwin
Smith's Shakespeare: The Man. Shakespeare's great-
ness can be recognised though we knew little about him,
yet the keynote of modern Shakespearean criticism is to
endeavour to see the connection between the plays and
the man.

Comes the question of the effect of psychoanalytic
criticism upon our judgment of living authors. Writers

CONCLUSION 247

like George Moore, of the living, and Strindberg, of the
recently dead, have not waited for posterity to make
discoveries about their love affairs. They told us about
them frankly in their autobiographical works. Other
writers, great poets like Yeats and Symons, have sung
of their loves more or less openly in their lyrics. When
posterity reads the biographies of these last two poets,
that will no doubt some day be written, it will, I believe,
learn that the emotions these poets expressed in their
work had a real basis. But we have no right to probe into
an author's private life while he is alive; we may make
detailed deductions from his work, but we should not
give them publicity. The reader who finds the early
Kipling cynical about women, who notes Hardy con-
stantly reiterating the tragedies caused by love, may
venture to guess there must be some reason for this, but
it would be a vicious criticism that made this topic the
subject of an article while these men are alive. One
who reads Wells' New Machiavelli or Dreiser's The
Genius and observes the author's preoccupation with
the marriage problem, may also draw his own conclusions
about how much the fiction is inspired by reality, but it
is a fitter subject for posterity to take up. Occasion-
ally an author like Robert Herrick or Upton Sinclair
has his domestic affairs dragged into the limelight, on
account of the sensational interest of our newspapers,
and the reader learns that novels like One Woman's
Life and Love's Pilgrimage were somewhat autobiograph-
ical.

There has been a great tendency in our day on the
part of authors to write autobiographical novels. We
should not deprecate this tendency. When I think
that Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola, Tolstoi,
Dostoievsky and Turgenev, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,

248 THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

George Eliot, George Meredith and Henry James were
often autobiographical, I realise that all literary men,
novelists as well as poets, are compelled to wear their
hearts on their sleeves by virtue of their art. That criti-
cism which reproached Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Senan-
cour and De Musset for having been occupied too much
with themselves is unfair. With whom else would the
critics have the authors occupied? A man cannot get
out of himself. When he undertakes to write a book,
he tells us practically beforehand that he is going to
talk about himself.

Therefore, such excellent novels of our time as Jack
London's Martin Eden, Stephen French Whitman's Pre-
destined, Maugham's Of Human Bondage and Beres-
ford's Invisible Event are to be commended. Should
these authors' renown live, posterity will learn that some
of the emotional life lived by the characters had been
experienced by the authors themselves. It is, how-
ever, not a matter of importance whether the mere in-
cidents recorded in these novels actually transpired in
the authors' lives.

Many of us are so constituted that we like to sit
down with an author like Montaigne or Hazlitt, who
takes us into his confidence. We dislike reticent and
cold people in literature as much as in Ufe. We do not
ask writers to tell us about their private affairs, but
we want them to talk at least indirectly about things
that are close to their heart. And one may be sure
they will interest us. Shakespeare unlocked his heart
to us in his sonnets and in his plays as well.

It is of the world's great books that it can always be
said as Whitman did of his own, "Whoso touches this
book touches a man."

CONCLUSION 249

n

Art and literature are realities in themselves. The
depicting of an event enshrines it as a thing of beauty;
the event itself may be dull. We meet Falstaffs in real
life and waste no time on them; put into a play by a mas-
ter, Falstaff gives us an artistic thrill. How many of the
people who enjoy Dickens' novels about humble people
would be interested in them in real life? Dickens's magic
pen makes us receive a sensation reading about them that
they cannot give us themselves. It is the artist's per-
sonality and art that count.

Gissing and Flaubert wrote about ordinary people but
they themselves were intellectual aristocrats; they had
nothing in common with the people they wrote about (ex-
cept with those who were disguised portraits of them-
selves). In fact, they despised them; they personally
were recluses and merely sympathised with and were
interested in the people they wrote about as subjects for
art. If we had met Madame Bovary personally and
heard her tale from her own mouth, the effect upon us
would be small compared to that of the novel.

The domestic troubles of our next door neighbours
may be a bore to us. We may not care to meet the
people personally, but a great novel or play describing
the matrimonial difficulties of fictitious characters gives
us a distinct artistic thrill. The sorrows of people who
lived centuries ago move us more than those of people
we know, because of the magic power of art.

Those who from time immemorial called art magical
were right. Many people who disparage art and litera-
ture say to the writer and the reader that they should
enter the whirlpool of life, and live themselves. No ad-

2 so THE EROTIC MOTIVE IN LITERATURE

vice could be more foolhardy. To read beautiful books
about other people's lives is itself a high form of life,
a life that only art can furnish. It also has its advan-
tages, when we think of the characters in literature whom
we enjoy reading about and yet would never care to meet.
Who would really want to meet Becky Sharp or Peck-
sniff?

That artistic pleasure we get, mingled with actual
pain on account of the sorrows of poets, is to us a decided
part of our lives. The fact that we are brought into con-
tact with a beautiful series of lines voicing human grief
in such a manner that both our human and aesthetic emo-
tions are aroused, is a privileged pleasure that only those
who can enjoy poetry may derive.

It does not follow, however, that a man must confine
himself solely to the artistic or intellectual life. To
know of love only through books and not through ex-
perience is not to have lived a full life. To read the views
of Aristotle on friendship and never to have had any
real friendships is also but leading an incomplete life.

Literature is real and to read and write it is to live.